2021 Enhancements

Once again, Octo has seen a number of refinements, generalizations, and outright new features in the past year.

• A standalone, "offline" port of Octo called c-octo was developed, offering new options for developing Chip8 games at a command-line, from your favorite text editor, or on older machines. As a result of this rewrite effort, both c-octo and web-octo have overhauled error messages: more consistent and more informative!
• The :monitor construct can now be used for registers and register ranges rather than just memory, giving you more ways to debug.
• By popular demand, the :unpack construct now supports 16-bit pointers, including forward-references to labels.
• As a companion to :byte, there is now a :pointer construct for assembling 16-bit values at once, again including forward-references to labels.
• XO-Chip has gained a new audio instruction, pitch := vx, allowing programs far more flexibility in audio generation. Among other things, this instruction makes it possible to generate 8 octaves of pure musical tones!

As always, more information about any of the above language features can be found in Octo's Manual and the XO-Chip specification.

Why not give the new features a spin in this year's Octojam?