Implemented text output in the browser (the tricky bit was mostly ingesting data for the CE small font) and have been filling in more example stuff, so here's a demonstration of what meaningful bytecode commands look like:

The next thing to sort out will probably be in allowing the user to load images from disk and then load those images as sprites.

I hooked up image loading and sprite rendering, so now the web thing is probably good enough to be useful, though it's not currently possible to export bytecode. That's fine however, because the calculator-side implementation of using bytecode needs more work.

The web tool is available at https://taricorp.gitlab.io/web1999/

Since the implementation of rendering bytecode to display it is the same for both the web and calculator implementations, I don't need to rewrite rendering but I still need to hook up infrastructure for building bytecode (from Lua sources) into data to get built into the program, then also think about having the program detect bytecode from appvars (so it's nice and modular) and reimplement all of the existing windows in terms of bytecode.

I've implemented all of the built-in window kinds in bytecode now, expressed as Lua scripts that are run at compile time with the resulting bytecode embedded in the program. The space savings isn't as large as I might have hoped, but still nice to get: around 3 kilobytes savings before compression, and a little under 2 kilobytes after compression.

The real improvement this will enable is loading windows from appvars though, which I haven't started implementing yet. With that, variety in windows will be limited only by available archive space (rather than available RAM) since bytecode can be read directly from archived appvars (but then it can't be compressed). That will also make it possible for anybody to create a window kind that the program can load, or at least make it easier for me to develop new kinds (WEB2009, anybody?).

Thats a great update! It'll make it much easier to use.

Nothing new on the technical front, but I've captured a short video that demonstrates how everything looks in action:

This seemed worth doing since it's nice to be able to see everything about the program even without being able to run it on a calculator (emulated or physical).