TIS-100 – nice brain teaser for people
who like Assembler

If you like brain teasers, there is this cool game: TIS-100.

It’s a game, where you are supposed to solve Assembler based problems. You have a reduced set of instructions: moving data, basic arithmetics, few conditional jumps, and only one register – ACC. Well, in fact there are two registers, but other one is only accessible via ACC. In early stages you don’t have neither memory not the stack. Port operations are blocking, so you have to make sure things goes smoothly between modules.

What I have found most funny for me, was that kind of feeling related to missing elements coming from “normal/typical” architectures. I missed all these simple elements like stack, numerous registers, memory. Once you start playing, you need to change typical, assembler based, approach as you work with heavily reduced architecture. Another limitation is that each node (where you can run the code) has 15 lines limit and, sometimes, you have to pass data to other module to make intermediate calculations.

Anyway, this game is a real fun if you like low level coding. Learning architecture and getting used to instructions set will take you approximately 15-30 minutes. And here, Hacker’s Guide, you can find very well prepared cheat sheet for TIS-100.

The game is really worth the money – it’s just 12 PLN this week (during Steam Summer Sale).