Ask HN: Looking for alpha testers for HRAM (asm) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Looking for alpha testers for HRAM (asm)

7 points90s_dev2 comments

Hi everyone. I'm making an app called HRAM (hand-rolled assembly machine), and I plan to release it this week. But I need some beta testers first. Please send me an email at admin@90s.dev if you're interested. Your feedback will be helpful enough that I'll give you a free license. The app is only for Windows (10 or 11).

The app is programmable via Lua and has an assembly library built in, so you can create and run assembly functions at runtime. It has a 320x180 pixel screen that you can manipulate to help you practice assembly. The point of the app is to help learn low level concepts, in the fun environment of making a retro style game. I'm also in the process of adding threading/mutexes/etc also, but that may have to wait post release.

Very early manual, likely to change dramatically: https://hram.dev/docs.txt

Thanks for your time, have a great Sunday!

Someone requested clarification on another post, so here it is:

It's a native Win32 app, with a window of 320x180 pixels, which scales upwards as you resize bigger. By itself the program does nothing except read and run a specific Lua file located in AppData. Drawing to the screen is the main operation of the program.

The Lua API has a few built in modules:

- "image" for dealing with gpu images, which includes the screen

- "lpeg" so you can write a custom parser

- "asm" so you can compile and run assembly code from Lua

- "memory" so you can read and write to real memory addresses

It uses real memory:

All the APIs, including the assembly you write, can access real memory addresses. So you can write to 0x20000 and read from it, either in Lua or Asm, and it just works. And you get raw pointers as Lua integers that you can pass around, which lets you pass them through assembly and back.

The app has a few competing primary purposes:

- Learn or practice writing x64 win32 assembly

- Learn or practice writing a programming language

- Learn or practice writing video games like it's 1979

- Learn or practice writing programs that manage raw memory

That's incredible. A "leaky abstraction" in the nicest way possible.

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