TIS-100 Hacker's Guide | Hacker News Reader

TIS-100 Hacker's Guide

alandesmet.github.io

14 pointscapableweb6 comments

Fun to see sites like this! A great game I’ve had a lot of fun with. Great timesink too when you see there are solutions twice as fast as yours…

TIS-1000 is brilliant, but it comes very, very close to actual work!

I agree TIS-100 is brilliant, having a lot of fun with it, although it's very difficult! I disagree it's close to actual work, but I mainly work on web-related stuff, nothing close to having multiple, parallel chips that take minimally amount of instructions with basically no memory available besides one register. What kind of stuff you work on that is similar to developing in TIS-100? Always thought the machine in TIS-100 was based on mostly fantasy, but maybe there are systems like that out there today?

Microcontrollers! (and industrial machines in general). No, they're nothing like TIS - and you tend to write in C or similar with a good dash of bit-banging of assembly - but they're close enough that you feel like you're getting the gist. At least you know with TIS (and other Zachtronics games, like Shenzen IO) if you have a timing bug. In the real world timing bugs -- with industrial control equipment -- are some of the absolute worst to debug and often involved putting an expensive scope on the output to debug. Multiple chips in parallel often involves a lot of i2c and reading datasheets -- very, very similar.

The modern web feels totally alien to me. I'm much more comfortable using vim and writing html by hand (with a predictably horrible look) or Perl / PHP than "modern" JS frameworks. Typescript, JS and React are the stuff of my nightmares. I'm sure that there are developers who feel similar about bitmasks and pointer arithmetic in C.

I wish TIS would allow for aliases. Instead of typing out MOV UP LEFT all the time I would like to just type in MUL.

One part of the beauty of TIS-100 is (for me) the small instruction set of just 13 (14 if you count the secret one) instructions, and how little you can fit in each cell. I wonder how much aliases could actually help. You'd need to add the alias in every cell, taking up one extra row at least, possibly two (out of which only 15 rows exists in each cell).

Edit: By the way, your OS probably has some utility available that let's you write MUL on your keyboard + some keyboard shortcut and it'll expand it to MOVE UP LEFT. Easier way to get what you want :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com