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by thrillgore 896 days ago
Also of interest is Exapunks (https://www.zachtronics.com/exapunks/), which did a better job teaching me asm than my college course did.
2 comments

TIS-100 was also excellent. It's actually harder than real asm.
Have you also given Shenzhen I/O a run?
I gave it a try quite a few years ago. I had a mixed feeling. On one hand, it is a great simulation of actual hardware/firmware dev jobs. On another hand I wasn't sure who the target audience was. If you're doing this for a living you probably don't want to do that as part of a game too, and if you aren't, you probably will find it too dry and detailed because it is THAT close to a real job...

I haven't gotten TIS-100 however many years it came out for the same reason. When I feel nostalgic I just dust off some old tools and do some fun stuff with C or Assembly.

Turing Complete is definitely more of a game, however with a lot of educational value.

Shenzhen has some restrictions and mechanics I don't like.

- circuit board is too small and jumper wires are only vertical. - assembly lines per chip is too limited. - I don't like the plus/minus mechanic for conditions. - not enough microcontroller varients. I often wanted a microcontroller with 3 simple IO pins instead of the XBus pins.

Is Shenzen I/O hardware or software? Or firmware?
All of the above. You're placing components, running wire paths, writing assembly for the component.

An old Scott Manley video introducing it: https://youtu.be/UpJU3wIf-v0

It's quite featureful ... https://youtu.be/2tlW3S4V29Y and https://youtu.be/BGLWE6S68b0

The game is about writing firmware for a large Chinese multinational. It's also pretty fun.