uxn

The Uxn ecosystem is a clean-slate personal computing stack, created to host small tools and games, programmable in its own unique assembly language, made of 32 instructions.

It was designed with an implementation-first mindset with a focus on creating portable graphical applications, the distribution of Uxn projects is akin to sharing game roms for any classic console emulator. To learn more, read about the uxn design, or see the technical documentation.

Desktop Versions

To run the programs on non-uxn computers, you'll need an emulator for your operating system. Below are links to download the latest versions of the Uxn emulators for major systems, bundled with a few roms. Alternatively, you can find emulators for more obscure systems here.

The emulator comes bundled with a handful of tools, games and toys:

• calc, graphical calculator
• donsol, card game
• left, writing tool
• nasu, sprite editor
• noodle, sketch tool
• orca, livecoding tool
• turye, font editor
• catclock, desktop clock
• dexe, hex editor
• A Piano, piano toy

You can also download the emulators on their own, without roms, for Linux, Windows and MacOS. You can find the source code written in ANSI C, in the repository.

uxn guide

The same Uxn rom can be used on a variety of desktop computers, on tiny electronics, modern handhelds, and even in your, ugh, browser.

Our general cross-platform desktop emulator requires SDL2, alternatively, you could download the plain Win32 or X11 versions, but we will not cover these in this guide. If you don't have SDL2, here's how to get it:

sudo pacman -Sy sdl2             # Arch
sudo apt install libsdl2-dev     # Ubuntu
sudo xbps-install SDL2-devel     # Void Linux
brew install sdl2                # OSX
doas pkg_add sdl2                # openBSD

Startup

Double-click on uxnemu to launch it, on some Linux distribution, it might not be possible to do so, if for some reason uxnemu is not be clickable, navigate to the downloaded files in the terminal and launch it from there. To launch the ROM from the terminal, point the emulator to the target .rom file:

bin/uxnemu path/to/example.rom

The Uxn emulator can play rom files, which are small portable applications for the system. The Uxn package comes with basic applications, but there are many more to try, view the full list of available applications.

There are many ways to launch ROMs:

• With the launcher program, see preview image above
• By dragging .rom files onto the emulator window
• Via the terminal

Emulator Controls

F1

toggle zoom

F2

toggle debugger

F3

take screenshot

F4

load launcher.rom

Buttons

L-Ctrl

A

L-Alt

B

L-Shift

Select

Home

Start

Other Systems

Uxn can also run on classic consoles and on old electronics. Currently, there are ports(not all are complete) for GBA, Nintendo DS, Playdate, DOS, PS Vita, Raspberri Pi Pico, Teletype, ESP32, Amiga, iOS, STM32, STM32, IBM PC, and many more.

See the full list of emulators.

Need a hand?

The following resources are a good place to start:

• AwesomeUXN list
• Uxntal(XXIIVV)
• Uxntal cheatsheet(XXIIVV)
• Uxntal reference(XXIIVV)
• Uxn tutorial(Compudanzas)

You can also find us in #uxn on irc.esper.net.