termcade web

The public site for termcade, the terminal arcade. One static Astro page: what it is, what it comes with, what the four pixel styles look like, and how to write a game for it.

There is no authentication, no application state, no backend and no runtime environment configuration — the arcade and its registry are the application, and this is only the front door. The page ships no JavaScript, which is why there are no integrations in astro.config.mjs and why CI fails on a <script src> in the build output.

Commands

Command	Action
bun install	Install dependencies
bun dev	Start the Astro development server
bun run build	Generate the static site in dist/
bun preview	Preview the static build

The frames

Every terminal frame on the page is a capture of the real arcade, not a mock-up and not a screenshot. tools/capture.py runs termcade on a pty, types at it, replays the ANSI it writes back into a grid of cells, and prints that grid as spans:

python3 tools/capture.py /path/to/termcade   # rewrites src/frames/*.html

Text rather than an image, for the same reason the arcade is text: it stays selectable, it scales with the reader's font, and it cannot go blurry on a display nobody captured it for. The classes are a one-for-one map of what the arcade printed — logo, pick, on, dim and edge are the colours in internal/shell/menu.go and the playfield border, void is the black the canvas clears to, and a fill- class is a cell whose background was painted because the pixel filled the whole cell and left no half-block to draw.

Frames are only ever taken from a full repaint. The arcade sends cell diffs between them, and a diff replayed against the wrong screen is how you get a frame with the last one's asteroids still in it; capture.py forces a repaint by resizing the pty and letting the shell redraw.

What is in each one, and what a re-run would change:

• asteroid.html — the hero. Asteroid a few seconds in, with a wave that has been shot at. The rocks are seeded from the clock (games/asteroid reseeds on Reset), so a re-run gets a different field. The HUD, the border, the controls hint and the high score are the arcade's own.
• index-screen.html — the arcade's index. Whatever is in the machine's recently-played list is what lands on the page, Brickough included.
• pixels-*.html — the same ship in the same cells, four times. Asteroid starts a wave with the ship dead centre, so these four are reproducible and differ in nothing but how a cell is subdivided. They are set at 28px on the page: the type is larger, rather than a small capture being scaled up, so a pixel the arcade drew is still a pixel you see.

What else is on the page, and where it came from

Nothing is invented. The claims worth re-checking when the arcade changes:

• The three games and their descriptions are the arcade's own README. All three are starter-pack .tcade packages committed in the arcade repository and embedded in the binary.
• The pixel table — the values, the grids and the font requirements are TERMCADE_PIXELS', including that quad is the default and that sextant needs Unicode 13 or renders as tofu.
• The command table is usage in cli.go, trimmed to the commands a first-time reader needs.
• The contract list is sdk/game.go and sdk/input.go: 60 ticks a second off the measured clock, a seven-key vocabulary plus releases where the terminal reports them, a canvas in square logical units, a structured HUD the shell styles, an sdk that depends on nothing outside the standard library, and a frozen wasm ABI v1.
• The sandbox claims are internal/plugin and internal/engine: wazero, no filesystem, no network, per-call watchdog deadlines, and SafeGame turning a panic into a crash screen rather than a dead arcade.
• The held-key section is the arcade's input handling: the Kitty keyboard protocol's event-type reporting where the terminal answers, and the auto-repeat fallback in sdk.KeyTracker everywhere else.

The registry is live. Released clients use https://api.termca.de. TERMCADE_REGISTRY selects a different registry for development; the public site describes the production path.

Colour

The palette is the arcade's. #3fc4c9 is the colour internal/shell/menu.go renders the wordmark in and #e6c945 the colour it renders the selected row in; the greys are its normal and dim rows, and the greens and blues that turn up in a frame are whatever the game drew. Nothing was chosen from a swatch, which is also why a capture can be pasted in as it came out and still look like itself.

The page is dark because the product is. A terminal arcade shown on paper is a picture of something else.

Fonts are the platform's own. No font is fetched, so no visitor's IP reaches a font CDN and no CSP exception is needed to render the page — and the frames are drawn by the reader's own monospace font, which is the only way the columns line up.

Domain

src/layouts/Full.astro, public/robots.txt and public/sitemap.xml assume https://termcade.com. If the site lands somewhere else, those three files are the only places the host appears.