I wrote a new game over the weekend, as part of Open Jam 2022. My game is a retro CPU simulator where you enter programs in machine language (binary opcodes) using a "switches and lights" model. It is meant to be a minimal instruction set computer, used for learning about how computers work. I call it the Toy CPU.
The Toy is a DOS program that runs in graphics mode (640x480 @ 16 colors). Keyboard only. No sound. The Toy is released under the MIT license, on GitHub: https://github.com/freedosproject/toycpu My GitHub page also includes several sample programs you can enter into the Toy. Release 3.0 contains a precompiled DOS program you can run. If you'd like to see it in action, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IptoyRCRYFU Here's the entry on Open Jam: https://itch.io/jam/open-jam-2022 If you have an account on Itch.io, please vote for the Toy CPU! I think it would be awesome for a FreeDOS program to win the Jam - or at least finish in the top three. (There are no monetary or physical rewards in Open Jam.) Additional background: I teach a few university courses part-time. One is a 100-level course that helps students understand how technology works. In our unit about "programming," I've always discussed programming in abstract terms - these are College of Management students, not Computer Science students. This year, I decided to try something new. I introduced a prototype of the Toy, and had the students write a few simple programs for it (such as "A+B=C"). They came up with the machine code, and I entered it into the Toy and ran it. The students said the first program was difficult, but they quickly figured it out for the second program. After that, I wrote the "A+B=C" program in Assembly, and in C, and in Fortran - to make the connection that an "assembler" or "compiler" can turn source code into machine language instructions. Then we moved on to other topics. (Again, this is not a computer science course, just "removing the mystery" about technology.) _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
