Working prototype for converting Scratch games to run on an Arduino

[jaltekruse]

Hello Scratch community!

Re-opening over here in the monorepo - scratchfoundation/scratch-gui#9972

I have been taking an interest in computer hardware and I have been teaching a class about building DIY video game consoles using Arduino boards and the open source Arduboy schematic. I am hoping to create a follow up class about programming games. I thought Scratch would be a good platform to work off of, as I'd like to keep the class accessible to people new to programming, just as the hardware class is friendly for total newbies.

I have an initial working prototype of a conversion script that can take a Scratch game and convert it into an Arduino C++ project.

I made a post over in the Arduboy forum about this, and you can see on that page the converted game running in the simulator, it also runs fine on the Arudino hardware.

https://community.arduboy.com/t/first-arduboy-game-programmed-with-scratch-and-expanding-educational-use-of-the-arduboy-platform/12784

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_avibps9TQ

I was curious to see if there might be interest from the broader scratch community, or maybe even from the core scratch organization, in a project like this. The MakeCode arcade project from Microsoft that looks to be pretty directly competing with scratch has a list of hardware products that their games can run on. I think it could be a cool area for Scratch to expand into. I have seen a number of past discussions about people creating various bridges to Arduino from scratch, but I haven't seen any implementations that convert the full game code to run on a microcontroller.

I did make a post in the community forums, but so far I haven't gotten much interest on the post - https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/840113/