I love this game, and am so happy to see it on the iPad.
That being said, it's a bit of a shame it uses a virtual keyboard. Given the relatively constrained set of possible inputs (a dozen instructions, plus UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT/ACC/NIL), it would have been cool to see him explore some more experimental touch-friendly input methods.
TIS-100 is a fantastic game and it gives you lots of opportunities to use any dataflow or compiler optimizations you might know about. The instruction set is rather limited, not even giving us shift or bitwise ops, but it turns out to be more than sufficient.
I've made a youtube that demonstrates some pipelining and loop unrolling in one of my solutions for Signal Averager. This video does contain some spoilers but will give you an idea of what's possible in TIS-100, just in case you're on the fence :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBfEcxvJ6aY
I really loved playing this game on Steam and I would happily pay for more levels. I wonder how useful TIS-100 would be for teaching programming. The limited instruction set and number of registers make for a very simple and easy to understand programming environment.
My father used to teach microcontroller programming (after doing it for years at TI); he LOVES this game, wishes he had it when he was teaching students just a few years ago, and has recommended it to the professors who succeeded him.
I've enjoyed playing the Steam version of this. Really good puzzles and even has a story line. Print out the manual for a proper old-school experience!
They are very simple, imaginary machines. They only have one general purpose register, a single non-addressable register to which you can copy or swap the value in the main register and four I/O registers for communicating with adjacent machines. To get anything complex done, you need to use multiple machines and much of the puzzling is spent figuring out how to divide the responsibilities.
It is an imaginary machine. There are only about a dozen different instructions which makes learning it easier. It also makes solving some of the puzzles more interesting when you run into limits on the number of instructions that you have space for.
It is an imaginary machine, intended to have restrictions that most real hardware wouldn't have (like not being able to access the BAK register directly), but the aim of this is to make the game more of a challenge, and thus more fun.
Looks like it's also available on steam and gog, so you don't need an iPad.
This looks like it could be my type of fun. SpaceChem was awesome because it made me feel like I was designing microcode in a way (in that you have to coordinate independent things to work together with some basic commands), and KOHCTPYKTOP was really fun for (simulated) designing of integrated circuits from transistors by hand.
Here's a reddit AMA from 6 months ago. I guess the game is actually not new after all.
That being said, it's a bit of a shame it uses a virtual keyboard. Given the relatively constrained set of possible inputs (a dozen instructions, plus UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT/ACC/NIL), it would have been cool to see him explore some more experimental touch-friendly input methods.