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The first time I heard about this game someone mentioned another assembly language game called Human Resource Machine. I was so captivated by the design of HRM

The first time I heard about this game someone mentioned another assembly language game called Human Resource Machine. I was so captivated by the design of HRM (I'm a fan of the publisher, Tomorrow Corporation, thanks to Little Inferno), I forgot all about TIS-100. I'm happy to be reminded. Seems that the Internet likes to compare these two games. Here they are compared on Slant.io: https://www.slant.co/versus/6230/6231/~tis-100_vs_human-resource-machine https://www.slant.co/versus/6230/6231/~tis-100_vs_human-reso...

makmanalp 9y ago
Does anyone remember a similar thing that's not a game but an emulator-ish for a very simple cpu + color screen that people made small games / demos on? I wish I remembered more details or that I'd bookmarked it when I saw it...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- asciimo 9y ago
  This is a stretch, but could you be thinking of PICO-8? It's a "fantasy console" that you can write 32k game cartridges for using a subset of Lua: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
  - makmanalp 9y ago
    OH MY GOD you got it on the first try ... months of frustration ended. Thank you so much.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      I think about the CHIP-8 VM, then the CHIP SBC, and its PocketCHIP variant, which comes with Pico-8. They're all kind of intertwined in my mind, and thinking of any one tends to lead to all the others.
lmnt 9y ago
I tried HRM after playing a decent bit of TIS-100, and the interface was just too slow and clunky in comparison for me to keep going. One of the more brilliant aspects of TIS-100 is that you can always see the full program on the screen at all times, and part of the challenge is to refactor code by physically moving it around the screen. HRM in comparison only displays the code as a list of commands and I found it frustrating to navigate through, especially for big programs. Another really satisfactory part of the gameplay of TIS-100 was that I sometimes came up with a new optimization to solve a later challenge, and could then go back to my old solutions and get large speedups by applying the same optimization there. It made me play the game nonlinearly and go back and forth between the challenges and trying to improve my code in them. It's just a lot of fun for programming-minded people.
daemin 9y ago
I liked HRM, the story was a nicely quirky, and so far to date it's the only game for which I have 100% achievements for. The only thing it was quite annoying to write the code for the later levels since you couldn't see enough of the screen, so I ended up exporting to text and using a normal text editor to edit before reimporting.

makmanalp 9y ago

Does anyone remember a similar thing that's not a game but an emulator-ish for a very simple cpu + color screen that people made small games / demos on? I wish I remembered more details or that I'd bookmarked it when I saw it...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
asciimo 9y ago
This is a stretch, but could you be thinking of PICO-8? It's a "fantasy console" that you can write 32k game cartridges for using a subset of Lua: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
- makmanalp 9y ago
  OH MY GOD you got it on the first try ... months of frustration ended. Thank you so much.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    I think about the CHIP-8 VM, then the CHIP SBC, and its PocketCHIP variant, which comes with Pico-8. They're all kind of intertwined in my mind, and thinking of any one tends to lead to all the others.

lmnt 9y ago

I tried HRM after playing a decent bit of TIS-100, and the interface was just too slow and clunky in comparison for me to keep going. One of the more brilliant aspects of TIS-100 is that you can always see the full program on the screen at all times, and part of the challenge is to refactor code by physically moving it around the screen. HRM in comparison only displays the code as a list of commands and I found it frustrating to navigate through, especially for big programs. Another really satisfactory part of the gameplay of TIS-100 was that I sometimes came up with a new optimization to solve a later challenge, and could then go back to my old solutions and get large speedups by applying the same optimization there. It made me play the game nonlinearly and go back and forth between the challenges and trying to improve my code in them. It's just a lot of fun for programming-minded people.

daemin 9y ago

I liked HRM, the story was a nicely quirky, and so far to date it's the only game for which I have 100% achievements for. The only thing it was quite annoying to write the code for the later levels since you couldn't see enough of the screen, so I ended up exporting to text and using a normal text editor to edit before reimporting.