The Varvara personal computer system

Updated on 2023-02-12.

Varvara is a computing environment that prioritizes small programs and system portability, or being able to host Varvara on a wide array of computers, from typical Linux or Mac systems all the way to the Nintendo DS or Panic Playdate.

It features a resizable screen (up to 1024 pixels in each direction) with at most four colors at once (to stay at 2-bits-per-pixel). There are also keyboard and mouse devices, along with a file system. The most unusual aspect of Varvara is its virtual CPU, The Uxn virtual stack machine.

The only form of interoperability between distinct Varvara systems (equivalent to processes) is a “snarf” buffer, which acts like a clipboard.

Devine Lu Linvega has written some very compelling, focused tools for creative efforts in Varvara:

Left is a text editor for writing programs for Varvara. It only uses two extra highlight colors, for comments and labels (function definitions), which works out fine. There’s even a “jump to” field for quickly moving between labels.
Turye is an editor for proportional bitmap fonts.
Noodle is a 1-bit drawing tool.
Bicycle is an interactive Uxn evaluator, but I couldn’t get it to work with the SDL-based emulator. It lets you quickly prototype ideas, without the typical workflow overheads of compilation.