Any news of 0x10c? Seems that since a couple of weeks Notch didn’t say anything about the game and the development :(

The thing that got me interested in the game was also the assembler PC. Mmm, maybe I could write Tetris for it… And of course I asked myself, “how long will it be until someone writes a compiler for it?”.

Makes me nostalgic to the time where I was programming a CPC 464 with 64 kb ram.

@ Luke Maciak:

Thanks, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m interested in.

@ Chris Wellons:

Hey, I think you might be interested in this: a lisp dialect that compiles to DCPU-16 code.

@ peterix:

I think my brother messed around with BuildCraft. I haven’t tried it yet, but I had no idea there was ComputerCraft. I’m not surprised though.

@ ths:

The difference between MIX and DCPU-16 is that MIX was designed to be educational – that’s it’s purpose for existence. You can’t really use it for much other than learning low level programming. DCPU-16 has an actual external purpose – learning it gives you direct in-game benefits.

@ Chris Wellons:

Yeah, it really did take off. A lot of people are enjoying it quite a bit. I’m sort of trying to make a DCPU-16 resource link dump here.

I didn’t know anything about the DCPU until Notch posted the spec on his blog. Even at that point, I thought it was part of some puzzle, unaware of 0x10c. I studied it, noticing the spec he posted was incomplete (ambiguous, but fixed now). Fascinated, I showed my computer nerd friends, but none of them seemed to be particularly interested. I looked in r/minecraft and searched around a bit, but couldn’t find anyone enthusiastic about it at the time. So after writing most of my own implementation of it, I kind of gave up, thinking no one found it interesting.

Then you write this post and show me those two subreddits. Wow! This has really taken off! It already has a larger following than MIX (which ths mentioned) ever did, which I’ve also toyed with in the past. There is a lot of exciting potential here.

I’m with IceBrain; I’m not really interested in hacking assembly code. I’ve done enough of that before to get my fill. I want to see some compilers targeting the DCPU-16, and use them instead.

I don’t care for games at all, but assembly language and CPU emulators for educational or simply fun purposes have occured a long way back in the last millenium.

The Apple II with Integer-Basic (not the II+ with floatingpoint basic) had a 16-bit-CPU-emulator in ROM called SWEET-16 though it wasn’t very well known. The Apple User Group Europe had a very nice article about it in their user magazine back in the 80s when the II with Integerbasic was about to go folklore.

Donald Knuth invented MIX and quite recently MIX32 assembler exactly for education.

I personally don’t care about how it’s implemented, I just love the games with mechanics that let you automate the actions of your characters. More planning is always good and autonomous AI’s competing with other AI’s is too awesome.

I think this is an obvious continuation of what minecraft already is, especially when you look at the mods.

Complex resource gathering, processing and sorting systems?
Just look at Buildcraft, RedPower and IndustrialCraft. They give you the building blocks to make complex machinery – and a CPU emulator is one of the planned features of RedPower for some time now.

Then you have ComputerCraft, which adds simple computers (and robots, allowing for a great deal of automation) programmable with LUA. Combine that with current RedPower and its bundled cables and you get to program low level things like network communication with nothing more than a bunch of cables. And people actually do this!

So, I’m not surprised. Things went in this direction already ;)

@ IceBrain:

That’s what I’m thinking the game is going to be like: there will be the trading/ship building and exploring component that most users will mess around with. And there will be a smaller group of users creating in game software.

I imagine that there will be a way to easily copy and paste or load software modules into your computer. Like maybe drop a file into some specific directory, and then run load filename on your ships console or something.

This would allow people to essentially write “mods” and “extensions” but not in traditional meaning of these words – these would be consistent, non-game-breaking tweaks to the ship UI, efficiency patches and etc.

I imagine regular users purchasing a new propulsion engine in game, and then going online and finding an engine power optimization code to make their rig 10% faster than if it was running with the default settings… Or something.

But yeah – the ship to ship, and distributed network stuff could be amazing!