{"id":545026,"date":"2026-07-11T21:36:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T21:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/545026\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T21:36:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T21:36:08","slug":"micropython-is-this-summers-hottest-title-for-the-snes-thanks-to-claude-fable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/545026\/","title":{"rendered":"MicroPython Is This Summer\u2019s Hottest Title For The SNES, Thanks To Claude Fable"},"content":{"rendered":"

MicroPython, for the uninitiated, is a pared-down version of python meant to run on today\u2019s 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\u2019re declaring the hottest SNES game this season to be [FabianKuebler]\u2019s port of MicroPython.<\/a><\/p>\n

Well, except he didn\u2019t exactly do the porting himself: the Antrhopic LLM Claude generated the code, and performed most of the testing, as [Fabian]\u2019s test of its new Fable 5 model. A brief pause 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 \u201cAI slop\u201d by some definitions, but the port scales 430 out of 468 on MicroPython\u2019s core test\/basics, which makes it usable to play some simple python games\u2026 slowly.<\/p>\n

As you can see for yourself in an embedded emulator if you check out [Fabian]\u2019s blog, spooling up MicroPython takes about twenty seconds at\u00a0 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\u2019s 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\u2013 if you do, please let us know<\/a>. If you\u2019d rather just to see what Fable can do, the project is available on GitHub, <\/a>so you can judge for yourself how sloppy the code is or test out the ROM.<\/p>\n

Putting python onto limited hardware may not to be to everyone\u2019s taste, but there\u2019s a good case to be made for i<\/a>t. The SNES may actually be too limited, though. It makes sense\u2013 the kind of micros you run MicroPython on can emulate the SNES.<\/a><\/p>\n

Thanks to [Fabian] for the tip!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MicroPython, for the uninitiated, is a pared-down version of python meant to run on today\u2019s powerful microcontollers. As…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":545027,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,80],"class_list":["post-545026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/545027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}