Assembly | Hacker News Reader

Assembly

assembly.louve.systems

88 pointsshpx17 comments

This was a bit confusing for me. Is this a simplified Core War[0]?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

Seems like it, the footer has a note that it’s “inspired by Core War”

Ouch, completely missed the footer.

I love the idea! I never got too seriously into Core War but I remember discovering it as a high school student and getting exposed to assembly programming. I think that the "natural" language that this game uses is quite intuitive and the whole game is a great way to get started with assembly.

However, I do find the UI quite unintuitive at certain points. Especially when I wrote a program, I couldn't figure out how to run it in the local training assembly.

Website has gone down.

Slightly unrelated, but does anyone know what font is being used on the website? "Dos" is the only reference to it in the CSS stylesheet but I can't seem to find it online.

I’m pretty sure there are engines you can use to march fonts, but I’m not sure if they’re good etc.

I’ve never figured out how to even buy a font - I imagine half the sites selling them are selling pirated copies.

hello! i believe two fonts are used here: - Perfect Dos VGA 437 - Terminus

Heh, my program that just copies the current instruction to +1 wasn't allowed on the board, fair enough I guess :D

You can achieve a similar effect with a two instruction program where each one copies the other two forwards. In fact you can submit it exactly if you use with the bit encoding of instructions to construct the program in memory.

If you click "Let's take a peek", you can never get back to the front page. That's kinda annoying.

Its behind the `id` cookies, clear them or open in incognito.

Website is broken then, flag it \o/

I guess worms are still allowed as long as they are more than a single instruction, right?

I feel like not being able to treat data as code and code as data limits the strategy a lot.

You can't read what code is in a cell, you can only read and write data. So you can't do self-modifying code, beyond blindly copying an existing code cell somewhere else.

hello! i just discovered this forum post was the reason why my server load got off the charts :p Thanks so much for all the nice comments!!

In the game instructions are also data, the ones called "data" just happen to be empty instructions. So you can modify instructions on the fly! For instance adding +1 to a WRITE X TO Y statement will affect the Y parameter, so you can do self modifying programs. There is all sort of clever stuff you can do but I haven't tried too much - but you can also create instructions by adding or masking existing instructions :) there's also a handful of useful undocumented operations like multiply or skip if greater.

The whole source is at github.com/Rackover/assembly so if you feel like becoming a mastermind you can check out how the compiler looks like and predict how it will react to live instruction modification

Have a very good day ♥

Thanks for the explanation, appreciate it

Have a good day as well <3

Reply on news.ycombinator.com