From Nand To Tetris

[Paranoid Dualist!]

I am taking "Build a Modern Computer ..." on coursera given by the authors of "Elements of Computing" using simulators on their site "www.nand2tetris.org". It sure seems to me that much of this games CPU model follows somewhat closely (with a simpler ALU in the game's case) the course. So if you are getting stuck at all, check out the materials on www.nand2tetris.org for inspiration! Also the book (and part 2 of the course) carries on into making an operating system and more for the computer.
(Edit: Note that the HDL for the course is different then for the game, so keep that in mind)

PS: If the game's author is listening, your game is awesome, and I let people know about in the coursera discussion forums so they could play :)

[icy]

Thank you for the kind words!

I read the book and really enjoyed the first few chapters, which were an inspiration for the game. The later chapters however I sadly found not as engaging. While I liked the idea of the book to go "all way", I found the stackbased vm rather distracting than serving the purpose and the rest of the book took a lot of shortcuts. The operating system was simply a collection of simple functions... multiply, sqrt, string operations, drawLine(), alloc(), wait()... stuff like that. The book itself says "The dividing line between an operating system in this sense and a standard language library is not very clear".

[Hvaki Spark]

Just completed the game, really liked it but started seeking further. Found this course on coursera, too. And it starts June 19! I am going to take it, too.