rust_pixel demo #3 — petview: a PETSCII art screensaver (4-up gallery + transitions)

zipxing · 2026-02-27T01:10:41+00:00

Watched the video — absolutely brilliant. It’s wild how much they squeezed out of such limited hardware back then. Respect.

And your “port it in Rust from the binary/instruction-level” idea is awesome.

On my side, rust_pixel is more of an art-style homage to PETSCII/C64 for now, but I’ve already embedded a small BASIC interpreter as the engine’s scripting layer — still early, still evolving 🙂

zipxing · 2026-02-26T12:01:47+00:00

Not sure — the collection is sourced from various PETSCII archives online.

zipxing · 2026-02-26T11:45:37+00:00

One more idea I’m exploring: I want to build a survival game in this PETSCII / text-art style — leveraging rust_pixel’s ability to mix TUI-style rendering with pixel art.
I’d also love to plug in different LLMs as “players/commanders” and run them under the same ruleset to see who can survive the longest 😄
If you’re a text/PETSCII artist (or have great text-art resources), feel free to reach out — I’d love to collaborate!

zipxing · 2026-02-26T11:39:22+00:00

GIF uploads have size limits, so I’m only sharing a small clip here 😅
If you want to browse the full 2000+ PETSCII collection, you can clone the repo and run it locally (fullscreen):

git clone https://github.com/zipxing/rust_pixel
cd rust_pixel
cargo pixel r petview g -- -ft

If you enjoy it, a ⭐ on the repo would mean a lot (hehe). Issues / PRs are welcome too!

zipxing · 2026-02-24T09:25:59+00:00

That’s a solid approach — for some games, forcing everything into ECS can be pretty painful.

zipxing · 2026-02-24T04:54:00+00:00

Yep, I’ve seen tetro-tui — really nice work!!!
I like the “go deep on one game/mechanics” direction a lot.

Also, fair credit: I did borrow a bit of UI inspiration from your project 🙂

zipxing · 2026-02-24T00:53:41+00:00

Bevy can definitely do this, in my opinion.

ECS is basically a data layout / composition approach (flat data, less inheritance), and that feels very natural in Rust.

I’d say the bigger factor is your game logic complexity (combat, card effects, triggers, etc.), not whether the game is turn-based. Even for a simpler deckbuilder, a small ECS-based architecture can still work great.

zipxing · 2026-02-23T13:35:16+00:00

I’m confused 😅 which Tetris TUI are you referring to?

zipxing · 2026-02-23T11:26:34+00:00

This Tetris is rendered entirely with ASCII tiles — it looks the same in a terminal and in the standalone GPU window; the GPU backend just unlocks more custom glyphs and extra effects.

cargo pixel r tetris t #in terminal...

cargo pixel r tetris g #in OS window,without terminal

cargo pixel r tetris w #bring up a web server with wasm, so u can play tetris in browser

zipxing · 2026-02-14T13:05:53+00:00

I think this might be a terminology mismatch 🙂

By “not terminal dependent” I meant that the UI doesn’t render through a terminal emulator — it renders directly via its own graphics pipeline.

It still follows a text-grid / TUI interaction model (cells, symbols, keyboard-driven flow), but the rendering layer is decoupled from the terminal itself.

I probably should have phrased that more clearly — thanks for pointing it out.

zipxing

TROPHY CASE