> It's actually more comparable to designing a pipelined CPU than it is to assembly language, IMO. In a way, yeah. But the 6502 was also quite constrained, an

> It's actually more comparable to designing a pipelined CPU than it is to assembly language, IMO. In a way, yeah. But the 6502 was also quite constrained, and early systems further constrained it (e.g. the Atari 2600 only have 128 bytes of RAM). I think this game does a good job of emulating the amount of creative thinking programmers had to have to deal with the limits of those early machines. And the game does so while keeping things simple so you aren't spending your evening glazing over a 300 page 6502 programmer's manual. Regarding level 7, definitely a tough one! I ended up making what looks like the first solution with 4 nodes and 22 instructions. It's possible to cram the logic into one node, with some misc. decoding in a second and the other two as just transports. Back to your point, this isn't exactly like working with older, consumer computers like the Apple II, mostly because of the parallelism. I think that's because of Zachtronics' other games which involve a lot of data-driven, parallel engineering. Still fun though; well worth the $7.