For anyone interested, also check out this computer designed in Powder Toy game!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4eHgnLFk9k
NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch
11–20 of 141 posts
Re: NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch
#12This was so much fun! It brings me back to my first class in digial logic.
Re: NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch
#13There was this ancient Flash game called "Engineer of the People" that was all about designing IC circuits (NPN and PNP junctions) in the Soviet Union for some secretive reason. I never beat the game and got to the reveal. IIRC it was by Zachtronics, the same guy that did Shenzhen I/O and infiniminer (the inspiration for Minecraft).
I also played his chemistry/alchemy games SpaceChem and Codex of Alchemical Engineering. Highly recommended.
Re: NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch
#14Really cool, curious to see how hard it gets. Reminds me of college.
Same, specifically the Patterson and Hennessy course. Good to see this material being accessible for younger minds though.
Re: NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch
#15This is really cool. You've done a tremendous job in making this very usable (I love your yellow sticky note instructions).
Re: NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch
#16Building circuits is neat, but I think this has some problems as a game:
1. It seems to only let you save one solution for each level, even though there are two optimization goals. It should let you save one for fewest components and one for fewest NAND gates.
2. It's not really clear how NAND gate counts work in later levels where you're using potentially non-optimal components you've built? Like does it count each one as the number of gates that you used, or the number of gates that is optimal, or what? Someone else told me it was the latter, but it seems like XOR counts as 6 even though there's apparently a way to do it with fewer?
3. Why do some levels give me the message "This is optimal!" while others say "This is the simplest solution!"? What's going on here? What do these messages mean specifically? It's not clear.
All this adds up making attempts at optimization a bit frustrating and as such I just don't really want to play it very far. If you're not worried about optimization it seems fine, but if you are the interface really kind of works against you.
Re: NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch
#17Thank you for showing me how much I have forgotten in 15 years :)
Re: NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch
#18Very cool! Reminds me of all the fun I had with Rocky's Boots on Apple II:
Re: NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch
#19I've done the Coursera course, Nand2Tetris, that inspired this website [1] and found it deeply intellectually satisfying and engaging. If anyone is interested in learning about the logical primitives that build up to a computer, and how they're implemented using logic gates, I would deeply recommend the course! ----------- [1] https://www.nand2tetris.org/
Seconded. And a quick note that this course is based on the book "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles (The MIT Press)"
Re: NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch
#20Love this - I actually started implementing these circuits in C [0] a while back but never got past combined memory.