At our recent LARP High Frontier: The Drake Objective I used retroTerm my ANSI/VT terminal GUI widgets library to create a prop where the players interacted with an offscreen extra-terrestrial intelligence through a purposefully retro computer interface.
This is the whole reason the library got written in the first place.
Work started on retroTerm in maybe 2019. Then the game it was scheduled to be used in got postponed due to the pandemic and despite the extra time that afforded me I didn't manage to deliver anything usable for the game when it finally happened.
It was a terrible case of overpromise and underdeliver, ie. I delivered nothing usable. The work on the retroTerm library itself was fine but the messaging system it was to provide the user interface for just wasn't stable and we abandoned it at the last minute.
When a short 'midqual' LARP event came up last year I rewrote all the messaging code and produced a version of the thing with a cut-down retroTerm user interface that saw a tiny amount of use. There were still some frustrating problems though: centred on it needing an accurate timestamp for all the messages and me getting caught out by GPS just not working for this. I had not realised the building it would be used in had a metal roof and the dubious signal ended up causing it to end up with spurious date & time values, some in 2080. Which is perhaps a failing of the GPS library I used to process the NMEA sentences but regardless this was not good and caused it to misbehave.
As a result when The Drake Objective was announced I made some new hardware that included a hardware real-time-clock and did a ton of work on making damn sure the setup would have a correct time. It couldn't just connect to WiFi and get it from the Internet as it'd be used in a building in a field with no services and also very dubious 4G signal we weren't sure would be usable.
The new hardware worked around the issues well and the whole prop behaved pretty well during a weekend long game albeit in its still quite cut down form.
Part of putting this thing together saw me make some improvements to retroTerm.
I found and squashed a memory leak[1] and have just improved the way it handles 'list box' widgets so I feel it's in a pretty solid spot. Today I fiddled around testing it on an ESP32 over Classic Bluetooth Serial rather than a wired connection and this worked trivially easily.
This is something I can imagine use cases for so I'm glad I finally tried it out. Often ESP32 projects get built with little captive web portals to configure/control them but this gets 'big' quickly. Being able to run a wireless retroTerm interface for this is something I'm going to try in an upcoming project.
Anyway this was all a big ramble to say retroTerm 0.1.6 is out and seems to be working well.
Next on my list is making that multi-user peer-to-peer messaging system I originally promised back in 2019 happen. Even if we never actually use it I want to have done it and to that end have been writing great swathes of code in preparation already which I've been sticking in some new libraries. When they're more finished I'll share them.
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