Much Assembly Required: Assembly Programming Game | Hacker News Reader

Much Assembly Required: Assembly Programming Game

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After some hesitation about buying this game, I'm super glad that I did. The puzzles are well balanced with increasing difficulty, and I find them relaxing and fun

Like all Zachtronics games it a lot of fun, but near the end it gets HARD. If you like that you might try Shenzhen I/O next. You do a little assembly programming but you also make electric circuits using pre-to find parts to make things that customers request.

Agree on the TIS-100 recommendation. What surprised me most was just how open-ended the puzzles are, especially given the limited instruction set. There's a great deal of replay value just in iterating your own solutions to improve performance (i.e. reduce cycle count).

Will have to give the game posted on this thread a try as well!

Indeed. It brings space v time to the fore as you're "ricering" your solutions, and elegance v maximised kludge.

Also Chenzhen IO is wonderful

SHENZHEN I/O is the actual name: http://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/

Also available on GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/tis100 if you don't like adding DRM to a DRM-free game by purchasing through Steam.

I bought TIS-100 through Steam years ago, only had it a few days before they decided to suspend my account for 2 weeks and take away all the games I purchased. They we're all on sale when I bought them originally but the sales were over by the time I got my account back. I finally got TIS-100 back last week through GOG because I happened to see it and it was half-off (would have bought it anyway). Can't wait to finish it.

So why did you get suspended and had your games taken away?

Did it happen randomly?

They never told me exactly. My guess was that I happened to use 3 different CCs, all in my name, to buy the 3 or 4 games I bought over my first few days having the account. I meant to say in my original comment that they did refund everything, so it wasn't as horrible as it could have been but I did miss out on the sale prices, a few weeks of not being able to play a game with my friends, and it left me with an ever-lasting bad taste for Steam and DRM in any form (which is good in the long run I suppose).

We have bought every game with a different e-card an no problems so far. This means at least 500 different cards. E-cards was a service where you could create a credit card with a fixed amount of money on for each buy, limiting the risk involved in giving out your card details on the net. Sadly they shut it down recently.

Do you have a small claims court where you are? Might be worth going through that - depending on how much the account is worth.

I only had 3 or 4 games, they refunded the money. I only rebought 1 game after the incident because there was no alternative and I really wanted it. Now I wont buy anything else through steam, even if there's no other option.

Steam doesn't require DRM on games, publishers do.

TIS-100 is DRM free, buying it through Steam is self-inflicted DRM, you won't be able to run the game without logging into Steam. Maybe there are some hoops you can jump through to get it to run, but I don't want to. I now have a stand-alone installer that I can run anywhere I want, even without internet, and I obtained it "legally".

It’s more complicated than that. Steam is a distribution platform and you can get locked out of that, meaning you can’t (re)download purchased games. The DRM component, however, is optional, and at least some games (starbound is one, I believe) are distributed through steam without any DRM attached.

Someone bought me Starbound through Steam and I tried, maybe about a year ago, to run it outside of Steam, but couldnt get it to work properly. I'm sure it can but I'd just rather not deal with that.

The convenience factor of Steam is making the DRM argument moot.

Even with titles that I have the option of downloading DRM free, say via Humble Bundle, I will still just go for the Steam key because it makes it easy.

I don't think it makes the argument completely moot, especially for single-player, serverless games like TIS-100. I agree Steam is the most convenient platform out there. If they just took a little extra step to make sure DRM-free games would behave as expected (something like a download link to a guaranteed standalone installer that you can just back up and feel reasonably safe about having forever) in addition to the excellent convenience they already provide, no one could ever beat that level of service. Well, maybe someone could match it and not take 2 weeks to resolve an incorrectly flagged account issue that's immediately obvious to human eyes, then they'd have some competition.

GOG has their Galaxy client that you can use similarly to Steam. Buy, install and play from the client. Play is possible offline. Ofcourse you can still download manually too as an installer.

Much Assembly Required is very cute, looking forward to see what is possible when it is more finished!

Ohh, I really like this game! Another good one, in which you design ever more complex logic (ending with a CPU) is MHRD: http://store.steampowered.com/app/576030/MHRD

There is also Colobot (and Ceebot but it's more constrained IMO and it's not free), it's very fun (and not just programming but also some other stuff) even though the graphics look like PS2 and in theory you can finish the game with 0 programming. I had it in Polish long before it was open sourced.

https://colobot.info/

Also related. You'd never guess it from the name but Human Resource Machine [1] is also a low level programming game.

[1] https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine

Cool! Assembly has a lot of potential for teaching people the basic concept of a computer program's structure, microcontroller usage, etc etc.

But gee, have you ever tried to teach someone how to program a microcontroller using bare metal assembly?

It is not easy. If you tell someone that the GPIO registers start at memory address 0x48000000 and give them a list of what each register's bits do, they will look at you like your head just grew an extra head. These sorts of abstractions are probably a way, way better idea...

It is all a matter of teaching.

Back in the day, Z80 Assembly programming felt natural to a 10 year old version of myself.

I guess what we are missing are updated versions of these kind of books.

https://www.atariarchives.org

> It is all a matter of teaching

I think there is more to it than that. I started in the early 1980s when every computer booted straight into a programming environment. The manuals which came with them described their languages with examples and there was a large publishing industry supporting these books. The computers were relatively simple, within a couple of hours of typing something in you'd be seeing results.

Current computers and consoles are immensely more complicated and do not lend themselves to exploring. They also have a much wider audience who just want to turn it on and play rather than tinker.

There are still people with an open and exploration mind, they are playing with Raspberry's etc. I expect. We used to be the majority of computer owners, the numbers may have dwindles a little but we're now swamped by regular users.

Very nice. If you like assembly programming games make sure to try Human Resource Machine[0]

[0] https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine

Gf and I play this on the switch. It's brilliant.

I have a spare key for this, or it's on sale at the moment.

Thanks for building this! Am getting a "Cannot connect to server muchassemblyrequired.com:443" error. When I try to enter the live demo. Is it just an overloaded server?

Have definitely noticed an explosion of Learn Assembly / Low Level Hacking genre video games coming out. And can definitely see how this will soon become a part of "Computation Structures" courses. Even at the secondary school level. Keep it up!

The 10 Best Hacking, Coding, Computing Games

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/11/29/best-hacking-gam...

I can't drop my biomass...

Ah, iron and copper... 2017 is the year I was completely addicted to Factorio. It's not assembly, though you can program things with logical combinators, it's more like complete systems engineering.

Sounds cool, unfortunately the live demo does not seem to work on mobile safari.

I definitely needed this before my Computer Architecture Final. Sigh.

A very easy assembly game to start with if you find assembly intimidating is Box256:

http://box-256.com

It has a very limited/basic instruction set do it's easy to get going and WebGL based so it runs in your browser.

Technically it probably isn't Assembly as it's such a minimal instruction set with no real target architecture etc. but I find it really fun to play!

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