The Lambda Garden project

@lambdagarden.org

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Let's make creative computing safe, fun, and human.

A magazine poster for Rita, the Portable Digital Artbook-reader (or PDA for short). It's stylish. It's A6-sized. And it's dichromatic (this is the important part. Probably). With a device like this you can take your VNs and IFs anywhere with you and look like a more charming version of your early 2000s self. It'll be available this first of ap— well, sometime this spring. For some definitions of available. The device comes in three colours: a lovely Ajisai Pink, an elegant Ajisai Purple, and a cool Ajisai P-blue. Oh, right, translation note: "Ajisai" means "Hydrangea", in Japanese. Some important notes are scribbled at the bottom corner of the poster in very tiny fonts, but if you squint your eyes enough and stare at it for a good minute or two you can make out the sentences, "Game cards available separately. Actual console may differ from the illustration. The Flowering mermaid is not included." We imagine that the last part refers to the young mermaid dressed in purple and wearing a fashionable beret adorned with hydrangea blossoms as she holds one of these purple devices in one of her hands and attempts to scribble something with a hydrangea-tipped stylus, but we're not quite sure.
Viinyl programs start with the "% viinyl/1" header, and then include any number of declarations. Top-level declarations can introduce classes, update class and instance vtables, or introduce initialisation code that's executed directly at the booting phase. It's a pretty straightforward message-passing language otherwise.
The pngs double as the card's art and the game's data (the encoding "steals" the last 3 bits of each RGB component --- the PNG alpha channel is not supported). Here you have the card for the demo game "The Witch's Garden is Off limits!!", which features a cute witch in a lolita getup holding oversized shears and shocked that her rabbit familiars are eating her flowers again. At the bottom of the card you have the regular contacts for the chip, where it gets inserted in the console, an indicator of the position where the card should go, and a small EEPROM flash chip under the Vii console logo.
The main body of the console is shaped like a circle, with two bunny ears sprouting on top (but not rising higher than the top-most point in the console's circular body). You get a rotary dial as an input (which will move back to its "home" position once you release the dial) as well as 3 push buttons and 6 general-purpose leds.
Just picture this: you're standing in front of the bed of white lilies near the aquarium waiting for your date when she comes running to you, apologetic. "Have you been waiting for long?" You reply nonchalantly, "Oh! No, I just got here," before you realise you have, in fact, been waiting for an hour already. But, hey, it truly does feel less of a guilty mistake when that waiting time was over in a flash. Vii is a 4-colour handheld that fits in your bag so you can catch up on your adventure games when you're too early for a date, again. Available April firs— soon?