cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/47154614
Wow, this is so awesome! You learn real skills, starting at the transistor level. Add the coding and run real applications: chess, doom, minecraft clones, java, etc. GIthub repos
TINY-32 is a full 32-bit RISC-V computer made of 93,338 transistors. It passes the official RISC-V test suite and runs real DOOM at full speed. Fully open source.
This is an ad.
It is the itch page… no big deal afa listing the game and demo. Here are their github repos: doom, nes.
I really liked the idea so downloaded the demo to check it out and there are definitely some rough edges. Lessons complete the moment the circuit does so as to not even let you see results of your creation. Asking to keep playing around with your creation after lesson takes you back to lesson plan any way. Navigation and interface is kludgy at times. Weird bugs where connected wires refuse to act as such. Fantastic idea, charming interface but execution leaves a lot to be desired.
19 day old account
“PLAYED IN 30 COUNTRIES, RATED 5 STARS, TOP #1 IN CATEGORY”
hmmm
Also, nope, not Linux.
Yeah, that is strange. Guess that must be related to itch.io I’m running it on Linux (the installer is right there to download)
If this is of interest, you may also like EmuDevz. It’s free on steam or via browser (maybe other options). I started the steam version before finding out of the web version. Gist is you make a NES emulator, but they don’t call it that exactly in the “game”.
How much does one have to hate themselves to write an emulator in JavaScript? I did something similar before, but with a tiny self-made instruction set, and it sucked ASS big time. Did run after an afternoon though. At like 1mhz. It was an interpreter of sorts though, I am not sure if that’s what this does but would be interesting trying to JIT everything into a big string to pass to eval(). Would suck to allow self-overwriting code with this, but neither did my interpreter ig…
It sucks even more than usual in the “game” because the code editor lacks what I’d expect in terms of syntax highlighting, jumping between functions, finding references, errors, undefined variable usage and such. Maybe those features are available, but I didn’t know how to access them and I’m no JavaScript expert so a proper IDE (even embedding codium) would have saved me a lot of frustration. I didn’t finish it. I think I got about 2/3, but I thought it was an interesting concept. So overall, I liked the concept of EmuDevz and a different language would have probably made it a better experience (as would a better code editor).
…I know like 6 text editors and all my knowledge in them ends around the point where I figure out how to save and exit. I don’t consider that having an impact on programming. To find a function I can just start typing it’s definition if in the same file; run a quick
grep -riotherwise.Ok, but you listed a tool outside of the editor (grep). In this game, you dont get access to tools outside of the editor except a very limited “test” command.
You are 100% correct that it is possible to write code with only a plain text editor. It’s how I got started. Pico + man pages (vi didn’t make sense and I couldn’t exit it anyway so avoided it for a while), but even with “just a plain text editor” I still had access to other tools like a compiler and its output, etc,m but we’re not talking about programming on a normal system here. It’s a game inside which you type code as part of playing the game.
If you look up screen shots for the game, you’ll see what looks like a shell, but it only has a very small number of commands, so you don’t have the tools you would normally have outside of the text editor (like grep). Can you search multiple files in the game? Yes, switch the editor between each file one by one (it has tabs) and search. Would a better in game editor improve that experience? I’d say yes. On a normal system you could get around edutor linitations by using tools outside the editor like grep. This isn’t a normal system. It’s a fake computer inside of a game and you don’t get the typical tools outside of the in game code editor.
There may be some tricks that a JS developer would know to use inside the game, but I’m not a JS developer. That also means i need to look up JS standard functions and syntax outside of the game. Having it in game would be a better experience for me but not a requirement. I got pretty far in the game. I’ll probably go back to it as newer ADHD obsessions allow.
Ah, I see
Linux: extract and run (X11 and Wayland). Needs glibc 2.38+ for now (Ubuntu 24.04, Debian Trixie or newer). Older distros are supported from the next update.