lemonade/README.md

Lemonade Stand

A browser recreation of the Atari 8-bit BASIC classic — the one you typed in, ran on a TV, and lost two dollars to on a cloudy day.

It ships in two skins over one game. 1979 is the machine as it was: Atari blue, block letters, scanlines, chiptune. Remaster is the same rules with cel-shaded art, a crowd that turns up in proportion to trade, and a funk band. The rules never differ between them — only the paint. Switch any time with the button under the set.

React + TypeScript + Vite, and not one binary asset: every pixel is SVG drawn in code and every note is generated by a small synth on the Web Audio API.

Playing

npm install
npm run dev

It loads from cassette first, because that is how it arrived. Pressing PLAY on the recorder is also what unlocks the audio — browsers want a gesture before they will make a sound, and that happens to be exactly the gesture the game already wanted.

One to four players share the keyboard, hot-seat style. Each morning you see the weather, then decide three things: how many glasses to make, how many 15-cent signs to put up, and what to charge. Then the town votes with its pocket money.

• Lemonade costs 2 cents a glass on days 1–2, 4 cents through day 7, and 5 cents after that.
• Everything you make is made today. Unsold glasses are poured away.
• A hot, dry day brings a bigger crowd that will pay more. A heat wave is better still.
• A cloudy day can turn into a thunderstorm, and a thunderstorm ruins every glass you made.
• Street crews close the road now and then, and they tend to stay for a second day.
• Signs work, but with sharp diminishing returns — the fourth one barely earns its 15 cents.

Once the prices are in, the stand trades for a few seconds before the books open: the crowd arrives at the rate you actually sold, the tally climbs, and the till fills. It can be skipped, but the day is worth watching.

You are broke when you cannot afford a single glass. Otherwise the summer runs as long as you like; RETIRE closes the books and shows the standings.

High scores

Retiring writes every player's closing balance to a top-ten table kept in localStorage, reachable from the title screen and from the standings. Runs from the summer you just finished are picked out in yellow. Ties break on the shorter season, then on the earlier date.

There is no way to clear the table. A stand leaves the list only by being pushed off the bottom by a better one, so a good summer stands until somebody beats it.

The table is per-browser, not per-device, and it is the one piece of state the game keeps between visits. Anything already in storage can be edited by hand, so every field is validated on the way back in and malformed rows are dropped rather than trusted. If storage is unavailable — a private window, or a browser set to block site data — the game plays normally and the table simply stays empty.

How it is put together

src/
  game/       pure simulation - no React, no DOM
    constants.ts  costs, weather profiles, the demand curve
    engine.ts     rolls each day and settles the takings
    reducer.ts    the day/turn state machine
    rng.ts        seeded mulberry32, so a run can be replayed
    highscores.ts the persisted table, with validation on load
  audio/
    synth.ts      pulse voices, a drum kit, filters, look-ahead sequencer
    tunes.ts      the 1979 chiptunes
    funk.ts       the remaster's band
  skin.ts       which of the two skins is on, and where it is kept
  components/
    PixelScene    the 1979 artwork, in chunky rectangles
    CelScene      the remaster's artwork, and the people on the street
    Scene         picks between them, so no screen needs to care

The simulation is deliberately kept out of React: engine.ts takes a player, a decision and a day and hands back a DayResult. That is what makes it possible to run a few hundred seasons in a script and check that a careful player grows their two dollars while a reckless one goes broke about seven times in ten.

The demand curve

The original BASIC listing is not reproduced line for line. constants.ts holds a reconstruction tuned to behave the way the game plays: cheap lemonade sells out, sales fall to nothing once the price stops being a bargain, heat lifts both the crowd and the price people will tolerate, and signs help a lot at first and hardly at all later.

The television

An Atari 800 fed a 4:3 television, and a television has no scrollbar. The tube is locked to 4:3 and everything inside it is sized in container units, so the picture stays in proportion at any size. If a page ever did come out taller than the tube, Fit scales it down rather than clipping or scrolling it.

The people on the street

How many figures walk on is driven by trade, not decoration. Before you have priced anything it comes from the forecast — a hot day fills the pavement, road works empty it, a downpour leaves one soul hurrying past under an umbrella. Once the day has traded it comes from the glasses that actually crossed the counter, so the report shows you the crowd you earned. In a heat wave they fan themselves.

Sound

Audio starts on the first gesture, as browsers require. The 1979 skin gets the chiptune: two pulse voices, a triangle bass and filtered noise, with real Fourier-built duty cycles rather than a plain square.

The remaster gets a band. Same engine, more of it — a sine kick with a pitch envelope, a snare with body under the crack, sixteenth hats, and a sawtooth bass through a sweeping resonant lowpass, which is where the funk actually lives. Patterns are written in sixteenths with a light shuffle, and chords are just slash-separated notes in a step (F4/A4/C5).

Both run off one scheduler that queues notes 200 ms ahead, so the groove does not stutter when React re-renders. MUSIC and SOUND toggle independently.

Two people, two browsers

There is no server and no shared state: the whole game is a static bundle and lives entirely in the page. Two people on two machines, two browsers, or two profiles are completely independent — different seeds, different weather, different books.

The one thing two tabs in the same browser profile share is localStorage, which holds the high score table and the skin. They stay in step: each tab listens for the other's writes and refreshes rather than going stale.