Hi all. I could not follow closely the DCPU-16 movement, and now I am having troubles to put the pieces together; can anybody put together a brief explaination of what is going on? I can see from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCPU-16#0x10c that the game developer notch, known for Minecraft, is working on a new game called 0x10^c (why this name?), and this is somehow related to the whole DCPI-16 thing. I can guess that notch is writing an ad-hoc assembler to develop this game, correct? What did he need more than the framework he used in the past? I can also see that there is a channel on freenode called #0x10c-dcpu (8 people as of now) and another called #dcpu16 (8 people too). Can somebody give me the big picture?
Notch's 0x10c[1] is going to be a space exploration/trading game set in the distant future; players will customize and operate their own spaceships. One of its unique features is that the spaceships will be controlled by actual programmable computers; players will be able to write their own software and execute it within the game. DCPU-16 is the architecture for the in-game computers, and lots of people have jumped into developing software and tools for it.
It's pretty amazing how much stuff that the community has generated so rapidly. Lots of emulators, IDEs, compilers, code repositories, original software, ports of classic games, etc., have all reached a surprising level of maturity in only about a month.
There's nostalgia for the era when hackers completely understood a machine architecture, and worked by manually writing machine code.
Notch released an invented machine architecture - 0x10c. Many people who'd been thinking about these things (for romance, or 'cos they've written similar systems for uni assignments) have thrown energy at the specification. Hence, even though we only have a vague idea of what Notch is working on, there's a stack of VMs and related tooling for this invented architecture he's defined.
I'm excited about it. I was thinking about how I could create devices and arrange memory to talk to them on my walk in this morning.
It's only 15 minutes that I learnt about the project, and 'excitement' is really a good word to describe my feelings.
I lost interest in videogames in my teens, because I felt that writing my own code was much more interesting than running someone else's programs (my own opinion, totally subjective). But gosh, this man is writing a game where the better coder you are, the better you perform in the game (that's my understanding of the programmable-starships thing). Woah -- i might be actually back on stage :-)
Complementary to the descriptions provided: I run http://dcpuworld.com, which is a small news site I've been building to aggregate all the cool DCPU related projects, tools and tutorials.
