Documentation

An 8-bit live-coding environment in one web page. Letters on a grid are a program that plays a 4-voice sound chip and draws on a small screen.

A beat, a beep, a melody and a drum pattern, typed by hand in five minutes.

Ticks, operators, inputs and outputs, bangs, and the order things happen in.

The four voices of the chip, how to get melodies, chords, basslines and drums out of them, and what happens when they run out.

The screen, the palettes and the three layers; drawing with code, moving the picture, and making it follow the music.

Arrows that travel, emitters that launch them, rails, loops and switches, so the layout of the code becomes the rhythm.

Run an operator only on a bang, and carry values and bangs anywhere on the grid, so code can sit where you like.

Changing code while it plays, tempo and breaks, recording a video, and keeping or sharing your grid.

Up to ten people on one big shared grid, on a laptop and the room's Wi-Fi, with a view for the projector.

What to prepare, a way to pace the session, and what usually goes wrong.

The 49 operators and the symbols, one line each.

Clocks, beats, sequences, chance and arithmetic: the operators that make the numbers and the bangs everything else uses.

Arrows that travel across the grid and turn into a bang when they hit something, and the switches and turns that steer them.

The four voices of the chip (two pulses, a triangle, a noise channel) and the silence operator. A voice plays when a bang touches it.

The 160 × 120 screen: palettes, things to draw, the three layers, and the effects that move, fade, mirror and glitch the picture.

The characters that are not operators but still mean something: the bang, comments and rails.

What a cell can hold, in base 36; the notes, chords, noise and palettes, as tables.

Keyboard, mouse and phone.

The basics of the chip: one bang and one beep, melodies, drums, chords, movers and chance. The demo song uses all four voices.

Basslines on the triangle and the pulses: walking, octave, arpeggiated, with drops and slides.

Drum patterns and grooves made from the triangle kick and the noise channel.

Sound effects and odd textures: lasers, sirens, coins, explosions, and the chip pushed into strange places.

Pictures made by code: rain, equalizers, raster bars, tunnels, plasma, scrollers, kaleidoscopes.

Movers on tracks: switches, rails and loops that turn the layout of the code into a sequencer you can see.

Programs that are also pictures: the code is laid out as a city, a mandala, a circuit board, and it plays.

Small complete scenes with sound and picture together.

Short blocks to copy into your own grid: a flash on the kick, random notes that stay in key, and more.

20 chapters, from what 8-bit is to playing together.

The chips, the machines, the composers and the tricks: the app’s “Why 8-bit?” tab.

Sound, browsers, phones, where your work is kept, and why an operator does nothing.