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Up5k_basic

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49 pointssalgernon10 comments

For years I've been thinking about building a game involving 6502 programming. Something along the lines of you're stranded on a spaceship, all the critical systems have failed, and you have a pile of 6502 processors. You need to start by keeping yourself from freezing to death by building some code that keeps the environmental systems running, then you move into growing food, and ultimately into controlling the ships propulsion, communications, and navigation systems. All with programming.

Then I think that I'd be the only one that would want to play that, and shelve the idea.

Then I see something about people being interested in 6502 stuff, and think that maybe I'm not so crazy...

Did you see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c ? It was IIRC more like a 68k than a 6502.

Zachtronics makes great programming games. (Currently playing Shenzhen I/O). I for one think your idea sounds very cool. I don't know anything about 6502 programming, but that would be part of the puzzle.

I'd play it! One of my favourite mods for Minecraft ages ago was Redpower2 which included 6502 computers you could program to interact with the world via peripherals which was neat

Are there any games like that? As far as I know nothing ever became of that Minecraft-sequel/Elite-Clone that featured a fictional CPU and most programming games are rather educational and/or feature programming combat AIs...

Although it would be interesting how one could program a narrative into that, if the player starts out without any prior programming knowledge. First task is simple memory access, then looping is required etc.

There are a number of 6502-and-later-based hobby computers/kits either in production or design right now, so there's an audience for it. Just look at all these: http://www.6502.org/homebuilt plus things like the Commander X16.

This sounds like the sequel to rendevous with Rama when the main character has to learn how to use an alien computer terminal.

Cute project. I have a real Z80 plugged into an Arduino mega, driven by software and running an old BASIC implementation written in Z80 assembly.

It is a lot of fun to hack on this kind of systems, and with simple shields available online you don't even have to solder if you don't want to.

e.g. http://www.8bitforce.com/projects/retroshield/

The 68000 is also an excellent choice for these. There's even 8bit bus variants, and some howebrew computers[0] exist using it.

[0] https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:ecb:mi...

It is remarkable that the project uses the open FPGA toolchain (icestorm+yosys+nextpnr).

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