about

what it is

Three machine profiles, one community. The O8 is a 128x128 screen, 16 fixed colors, and an 11,892-byte Lua budget; the O16 widens it to 256x224, 32 colors, and a mode-7-class affine primitive; the O32 is a 320x240 wobble-3D machine with a textured-triangle rasterizer. Each tier is its own console — sibling machines, not upgrades — and every cart is a real PNG you can keep. The editor, player, and sharing live in the browser: open the console and make a cart. There is nothing to install, no account to make, and everything is free.

The name is the design. Each tier is its own machine profile — one cart format, one community, several vernaculars. The ladder is complete at three rungs; O64 stays reserved.

the culture layer

Because the machines are deterministic, the community features are honest ones. Every replay submission is re-run by the server before it lands on a leaderboard — an input log is the replay, and its state hash is the receipt. The daily challenge gives everyone the same seed; jams run whole carts against a shared seeded board. No accounts anywhere: carts are hash-addressed and comments are anonymous, with founder moderation.

the compatibility commitment

The intended 1.0 contract fixes the API, memory map, cart format, audio, and deterministic programming rules. The project is currently being hardened before that release. Existing golden-corpus outputs are preserved and checked automatically.

The platform around them — site, editor, player, CLI — receives maintenance: bug fixes, not machine changes. The behavior is pinned by a golden corpus that CI runs on every push, in Node, Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, so the promise is enforced by the build, not by intent.

credits

• The palette is Sweetie-16 by GrafxKid, dedicated to the public domain (CC0).
• Cart Lua runs on the wasmoon project's Lua 5.4 VM, wrapped by a shared core with cross-host compatibility tests.
• Original-assets policy: all seed carts' art and music were made for omibit. Nothing is borrowed from other consoles or their catalogs; tribute carts are drawn and composed from scratch.

for educators

The whole machine fits in one page of documentation, the editor is a browser tab, and the first hour takes a student from hello world to a cart they can link to their friends. The constraints do the teaching: a small screen, a fixed palette, and a code budget make every classic lesson — variables, loops, state, collision — visible and worth learning. Carts autosave locally and export as single files, so a classroom needs no accounts and no infrastructure.

for agents

Agents are first-class authors. A headless CLI (run, screenshot, hash) and an MCP server expose the same core the browser runs, and the determinism contract makes agent output verifiable: same cart bytes plus the same input log equals the same RAM-and-frame checksum for carts following the deterministic programming rules. The agent guide has the full workflow, and watch shows a recorded session of an agent building a cart live.