I thought it would be useful for you guys to have an idea of how I see the future of Micro-8:
Short term: upcoming months
Continue tracking bugs and squashing them !
Finalizing the basic toolchain so we have everything needed to make great little games, most notably adding the currently missing music editor/player.
Essentially reaching version 1.0.0
Mid term: 1-2 years
I want to create a couple games myself, if only to stress the system and help improve it.
Add new (limited) system features, such as timer interrupts
System optimizations
I will inevitably run out of YM2612 at some point and I will have to do a redesign of the board to integrate a virtual YM2612 into a larger FPGA.
Long term: >2 years
At some point I want to replace the built-in code editor with one written in Lofi. This wouls have many consequences:
More flexible editor, the community can mod it
Freeing up flash memory (probably around 20k)
Major system improvements
With the freed up memory, the language/compiler can be improved in many ways (new types (e.g. 32bit), possibly some generated code optimizations, maybe changing the VM stack model to a faster (and vastly more complicated) register model...)
I'm even thinking about the possibility of having a built-in minimal native code assembler, so that the user can inline native CPU assembly language instructions or create new native functions for Lofi in assembly language. This might be possible by reserving a small fixed user zone in flash memory and having the custom assembler managing the pages writes to the flash (and verifying the user does not attempt to address protected flash areas).
