A bot to execute BASIC code received in messages from a variety of sources on a real Commodore 64, capture the results in a 30-second video, and post the video back as a reply to the original message.

Heavy inspiration is taken from BBC Micro Bot.

The C64 is controlled by an 1541 Ultimate II+ cartridge, which is just about the slickest piece of hardware I've come across.

• Gateways stream in messages from their respective sources (Mastodon, Discord... pigeons) and enqueue them,
• A chain of workers handle the message:
  • Code is extracted from the message and tokenized (using petcat from the VICE project)
  • The tokenized code is uploaded to the C64 (using the Ultimate's FTP capabilities)
  • Video capture is started, and the code is executed (using the Ultimate's Telnet remote control features)
    • Video capture is handled by a Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB CVBS (composite) capture device (to be documented)
  • A reply is sent to the original source via the appropriate gateway, with the video attached.

flowchart
    subgraph queues
        direction TB

        messagesQueue
        tokenizeQueue
        runAndCaptureQueue
        uploadVideoQueue
        replyQueue
    end

    subgraph gateways
        MastodonGateway -- enqueue --> messagesQueue
        DiscordGateway -- enqueue --> messagesQueue
    end
    
    subgraph workers
        direction TB

        messageWorker
        tokenizeWorker 
        runAndCaptureWorker
        uploadVideoWorker
        replyWorker

        messagesQueue -- processed by --> messageWorker
        messageWorker -- enqueue --> tokenizeQueue
        tokenizeQueue -- processed by --> tokenizeWorker
        tokenizeWorker -- enqueue --> runAndCaptureQueue
        runAndCaptureQueue -- processed by --> runAndCaptureWorker
        runAndCaptureWorker -- enqueue --> uploadVideoQueue
        uploadVideoQueue -- processed by --> uploadVideoWorker
        uploadVideoWorker -- enqueue --> replyQueue
        replyQueue -- processed by --> replyWorker
    end

• Gateways
  • Mastodon gateway
    • first pass (using the hashtag stream)
    • understanding of @mentions
    • toot HTML parsing
    • replys
  • Discord gateway
• Connectors
  • Queue connector
    • first pass
    • support all queues
  • DB connector
  • Ultimate connector
  • Tokenizer connector
• Workers
  • message worker
  • tokenize worker
  • uploadCapture worker
  • reply worker
• Don't suck as a programmer
  • Logging
  • Test framework
• Devopsly stuff
  • vicetools image builder
  • compose file for local dev (rabbit, postgres)
  • remote access for app server
  • gitops