Don Williamson shared his real-time web-based code editor & interpreter for the DCPU-16 Virtual Machine. It makes nice use of the canvas tag for a beautiful blue console, features a real-time recompile as you type, and thanks to some custom DCPU-16 support for Marijn Haverbeke's wonderful CodeMirror syntax highlighting textarea library, it'll give you real-time error feedback as you type.
The developer community has already made some incredibly quick progress on implementing assemblers, interpreters, and emulators for the proposed virtual computer in 0x10c, Notch's latest game. But the truth is that the majority of programmers out there couldn't be bothered with spending enormous amounts of time writing anything much more complicated than a "hello world" application in assembly. What's on the top of everybody's mind is creating a compiler for a more widely used language.
Here's a chronological sequence of screen-grabs showing progress on the 0x10c shape editing engine so far. As of now, you can easily resize and move cubes, as well as squeeze down the size of their top plain to change them into symmetrical trapezoid-like shapes. Texture shading is now supported, and for a brief amount of time, he enabled smooth shadows (which look great, but slow the frame rate by 10x). Take a look:
This morning's live stream of Notch coding part of the shape editing engine for 0x10c included a very brief moment where he typed out his pronounciation of 0x10c on the screen. It's not clear how he got to this (or even if he was just trolling the live-stream viewers), but according to notch, it's pronounced ten screw:
Update: Based on comments from Adam Novak, this article has been updated to better reflect how the video memory range works. You can check out his working emulator (written in c) here.
; Assembler test for DCPU ; by Markus Persson set a, 0xbeef ; Assign 0xbeef to register a set [0x1000], a ; Assign memory at 0x1000 to value of register a ifn a, [0x1000] ; Compare value of register a to memory at 0x1000 .. set PC, end ; .. and jump to end if they don't match
Yesterday, Mojang announced their next video game project 0x10c, and the response has been tremendous. Discussions have covered everything from the math mystery over the game's name, to creating projects that interpret the assembly instruction code the in-game computers use (more on that later), to the debate over why a monthly fee would be required to play online in the "multiverse". To answer that last one, Mojang wants to run everyone's virtual computers in their cloud, even if the user is...
As you should you, one of the biggest features in 0x10c (I'll just call it "Zero") is the DCPU 16-bit computer. I found a mod that's been out since December, 2011, called ComputerCraft which can be found here.
The first time I saw the name, 0x10c, I said to myself, "What the hell? How do I even pronounce that?". I went to the official site for 0x10c and read about the game. I discovered that the "c" is an exponent, so I figured it was a math problem.
