TIS-100P on the App Store | Hacker News Reader

TIS-100P on the App Store

itunes.apple.com

110 pointsshawndumas22 comments

I love this game, and am so happy to see it on the iPad.

That being said, it's a bit of a shame it uses a virtual keyboard. Given the relatively constrained set of possible inputs (a dozen instructions, plus UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT/ACC/NIL), it would have been cool to see him explore some more experimental touch-friendly input methods.

It doesn't seem fair to not allow proper comments and label choices using the keyboard...

In those cases, the keyboard could pop up. For most instructions, you don't need the keyboard.

I recall that this may be a unity game, I'm not sure how hard it would be to implement a custom keyboard in unity.

It already has a custom keyboard, styled (quite well!) to look and sound like one you'd find on an early microcomputer.

TIS-100 is a fantastic game and it gives you lots of opportunities to use any dataflow or compiler optimizations you might know about. The instruction set is rather limited, not even giving us shift or bitwise ops, but it turns out to be more than sufficient.

I've made a youtube that demonstrates some pipelining and loop unrolling in one of my solutions for Signal Averager. This video does contain some spoilers but will give you an idea of what's possible in TIS-100, just in case you're on the fence :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBfEcxvJ6aY

http://reddit.com/r/tis100/

I really loved playing this game on Steam and I would happily pay for more levels. I wonder how useful TIS-100 would be for teaching programming. The limited instruction set and number of registers make for a very simple and easy to understand programming environment.

My father used to teach microcontroller programming (after doing it for years at TI); he LOVES this game, wishes he had it when he was teaching students just a few years ago, and has recommended it to the professors who succeeded him.

If you want to play an emulator of TIS-100 in PC, I would recommend this one [1].

It is TIS-100, not TIS-100P. I don't know what difference between those.

[1]: https://github.com/eviltrout/tis-100

I've enjoyed playing the Steam version of this. Really good puzzles and even has a story line. Print out the manual for a proper old-school experience!

Is the assembly language an existing variation, or some imaginary machine?

They are very simple, imaginary machines. They only have one general purpose register, a single non-addressable register to which you can copy or swap the value in the main register and four I/O registers for communicating with adjacent machines. To get anything complex done, you need to use multiple machines and much of the puzzling is spent figuring out how to divide the responsibilities.

It is an imaginary machine. There are only about a dozen different instructions which makes learning it easier. It also makes solving some of the puzzles more interesting when you run into limits on the number of instructions that you have space for.

It is an imaginary machine, intended to have restrictions that most real hardware wouldn't have (like not being able to access the BAK register directly), but the aim of this is to make the game more of a challenge, and thus more fun.

Someone make an API to link this and Starfighter.io.

Given the trivial instruction set, you could probably do it yourself!

Pretty niche market they're going after with this one! I'd buy it if I had an iPad.

Looks like it's also available on steam and gog, so you don't need an iPad.

This looks like it could be my type of fun. SpaceChem was awesome because it made me feel like I was designing microcode in a way (in that you have to coordinate independent things to work together with some basic commands), and KOHCTPYKTOP was really fun for (simulated) designing of integrated circuits from transistors by hand.

Here's a reddit AMA from 6 months ago. I guess the game is actually not new after all.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3brxcs/i_am_zach_bart...

I got it through Stream last summer, it's super fun. I think I only paid like $3 for it but I would definitely pay the $7 it's at now.

There's also a version for OS X/Windows/Linux. It's just called TIS-100 (no p).

Would love to see this on android since its built in unity (or at least the original was).

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