MicroPython, for the uninitiated, is a pared-down version of python meant to run on today’s powerful microcontollers. As impressive as it was for its day, the SNES is not quite in their leage in terms of computing power. Time marches on, and so while there may be other indie releases worth mentioning, we’re declaring the hottest SNES game this season to be [FabianKuebler]’s port of MicroPython.
Well, except he didn’t exactly do the porting himself: the Antrhopic LLM Claude generated the code, and performed most of the testing, as [Fabian]’s test of its new Fable 5 model. A brief during an export ban showed that Opus would crash and burn on the same task, but Fable was able to get things quickly back on track. It might be “AI slop” by some definitions, but the port scales 430 out of 468 on MicroPython’s core test/basics, which makes it usable to play some simple python games… slowly.
As you can see for yourself in an embedded emulator if you check out [Fabian]’s blog, spooling up MicroPython takes about twenty seconds at 3.58 MHz, and after that you can watch some sprites be bounced at a blistering 0.8 fps on the simulated PPU. [Fabian] seems satisfied with that performance, and impressed with Fable’s efforts at optimization. What to you think? Does the hardware have much more to give, or is that about it, given the nature of the Pythonic beast? Perhaps some plucky human could become a digital John Henry by producing a better, faster port– if you do, please let us know. If you’d rather just to see what Fable can do, the project is available on GitHub, so you can judge for yourself how sloppy the code is or test out the ROM.
Putting python onto limited hardware may not to be to everyone’s taste, but there’s a good case to be made for it. The SNES may actually be too limited, though. It makes sense– the kind of micros you run MicroPython on can emulate the SNES.
Thanks to [Fabian] for the tip!