Senbir

Senbir is a “game”. Sorta. More than anything, it’s a sandbox with a fully-featured virtual computer, but it does include some short tutorial levels to help guide you all the way to building a simple bootloader that can run a program (read: a win screen) off your disk. That’s all well and good, you might be thinking to yourself, “but how does it fit in with the theme?”

ABOUT

Your computer only has 128 bytes of RAM. That’s 32 memory addresses (1 address = 4 bytes) in RAM. Your programs have to fit into 32 addresses or less. Your drive is bigger (1024 bytes in 256 addresses), but by no means the end-all be-all of storage. This is all REAL SIMULATION, too. You’re writing actual assembly (and by extension, bytecode) for the virtual TC-06 processor that lives in your computer. You can, in theory, make anything. You have a monitor - data port 0. You can read from it and write to it. A harddrive, port 1. Read and write access. A keyboard, port 2. Even a mouse in port 3.

You've been given an old TC-06 based home computer and some hardware to go with it.  Your gifter gave you a goal: load a program from the included harddrive and run it.  The main actual game section is a series of four levels/tutorials guiding you through some of the assembly language, up to the grand finale of writing a "BIOS" that will load the win screen program off the disk.  Just don't run out of space!

Beyond that point, you're free to do whatever.  You can try to program something in that tiny amount of space, or if that’s all a little too restrictive for you, then there is an Extended mode that gives you 1kB of RAM & an 8kB drive, as well as a Custom mode that lets you pick pretty much every number yourself.

There's also an official Discord server up - it requires manual verification for posting permissions to be added, so if you join in the middle of the night, there's a chance you won't be able to be able to post for a bit. Please don't spam, be respectful, etc - basically, just read everything in #rules.

(Temporary thing: in light of recent bad actors engaging in Discord data-scraping, the server widget is hereby *disabled*.  Post on the forums if you need a manual invite.)

RISC-06

RISC-06 is a spinoff of the TC-06 processor architecture designed to be super-low-fi.  I made it mainly as an experiment to learn how to do a C++ library (the VM seen here is powered by a general library) for later use in Senbir itself (a C++ TC-06 will have ALL THE PROCESSING SPEED) and it came out pretty nice.

You can download the RISC-06 IDE from this page, which gives you a full-featured development environment with a basic assembler, debug tools, integrated VM, and manual.  It's all very WIP and experimental, so expect things to change & explode a lot.