131–140 of 177 posts
I think he should just use PDP8 ISA, just 6 instructions, even stupid people can manage that much.
The PDP-8 was designed to be inexpensive to implement with the hardware available at the time. It would not be an ideal choice for this purpose.
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This opens a whole stream of electronic warfare, however, the problem is that this will be writing programs that have no real-world usage. Except... These programs will be a great way to introduce both kids and adults to programming as learning it will give an edge to people. Question: Will we need to program an OS? And does it run Linux?
I expect that there will be some kind of default OS released with the game, and that many alternatives will pop up very quickly. It will not run Linux, because Linux requires a 32-bit CPU with megabytes of RAM. Someone might write a Linux-like system for it though.
It is unlikely to need any mechanism for managing drivers for example (unless you can build custom hardware). You might need some form of scheduler if you are running different programs to do different stuff (weapons , engines , navigation) but this could be something very simple and again baked into the emulator.
Some form of shell might be nice, but again not necessarily required.
I'd be interested to see details on memory protection. Self-modifying code means evolutionary programming, which I am very much for. Conditional branching is strange.
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I worry about the griefing potential here. I can imagine nothing pissing off a noob more than getting a virus within 10 minutes of play and having no idea how to stop his ship from self destructing. Perhaps this will need some sort of firewall system built in where ships cannot communicate unless ports have been explicitly opened. Perhaps some sort of communications proxy that can serve for safe communications. It co…
It could have a system similar to EVE I hope this is the opposite of EVE in practically every way... except the high-level concept. Let's not give Notch any ideas.
Examples would be: The Economy. Ship Configuration System. The Artstyle. The security model. The unforgivingness (made you think carefully before you acted).
The problem was just that the combat always felt a bit bland and favored players with the biggest ISK supply and XP. So in reality you needed to be part of a huge corp and wait for months for skill training to be competitive.
Now here's an interesting bit: "Question: can we trade the programs we create? How will you stop malicious viruses etc?" "yes. And I won't stop viruses, the players will have to do that themselves." ~ https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/187474819980328962
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This opens a whole stream of electronic warfare, however, the problem is that this will be writing programs that have no real-world usage. Except... These programs will be a great way to introduce both kids and adults to programming as learning it will give an edge to people. Question: Will we need to program an OS? And does it run Linux?
Learning about assembly/to-the-metal coding is probably not the best way to learn programming. "OP? LOAD? REGISTER? PC LOAD LETTER? What's a word? There's only 8 registers? Does that mean I can only save 8 things? What do you mean I have to push things into a stack?" This is why most people advocate learning python or ruby. You don't have to deal with the underlying manipulation of the computer until you've decided y…
Just waiting for the first post about programming this CPU to pop up on Stack Overflow ... :) It's quite an interesting architecture. From an initial perusal, I found these features note-worthy: * Explicit access to PC as a register, makes "computed goto" trivial and very natural. * Because of the above, there is no JMP instruction. * Treating operations on registers as "values" makes the instruction set very orthogo…
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I think so far there are only assemblers, not C compilers (or any high level languages)?
Ahh, I was only answering the last question. Now that we have some emulators, people are working on compilers.