TIS-100: Tessellated Intelligence System

Zachtronics is a contender for the greatest game studio you&#x27;ve never heard of.<p>If you&#x27;re a fan of Factorio, you owe it to yourself to play SpaceChem, TIS-100, Shenzhen I&#x2F;O, Opus Magnum, Exapunks, and Last Call BBS.<p>(In fact, since Factorio was inspired by a Minecraft mod, and since Zachtronics&#x27; Infiniminer was the direct inspiration for Minecraft, there&#x27;s no Factorio without Zachtronics!)

TIS-100 is great. The “mesh of many tiny cores” architecture is cool, and also somewhat mind-bending — but the simplicity of the TIS design makes it just about possible to get your head around it.<p>After playing TIS a bit I found it really interesting to read about the Transputers and the Connection Machines, two similar real-world architectures.<p>David Ackley’s T2 Tile project[0] and Movable Feast Machine[1] look similar to me too, but they take the idea much further; the aim is to create an infinitely scalable and totally decentralized architecture. I only know a little about it, but it’s super cool stuff.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;t2tile.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;t2tile.com&#x2F;</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;movablefeastmachine.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;movablefeastmachine.org&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve finished Exapunks. Should go back and finish TIS-100.<p>One thing I both love &amp; hate about Zachtronics is the Histogram of Doom that appears at the end of each problem. There&#x27;s no better feeling than ending up in the top ranks for efficiency or speed. And no worse feeling than refactoring everything and still not budging from the middle of the pack.<p>Considering you&#x27;re being ranked against other players, in some ways this makes a Zachtronics game one of the more vicious multiplayer games. I mean, you&#x27;re never playing against another player directly. But you&#x27;re always being compared to others and it can be humbling at times.

As a software developer who occasionally having fun with assembly coding, I think this Shenzen&#x2F;IO are the finest coding games by Zachtronics (and probably in general, ever).<p>I&#x27;d love an updated&#x2F;improved version of CoreWar, but probably it&#x27;s too geeky for most people. Oh well...

At one stage we seriously considered ditching programming questions in our interview process and instead have candidates play 2 levels of TIS-100

One thing I enjoyed about TIS-100 was trying to get the low cycles or low instruction count. I remember the &quot;Aha!&quot; moment when I discovered that it often not possible to get both at the same time.<p>I still haven&#x27;t finished all the levels, I should really finish it one day.

Underrated game that is the most fun I’ve ever had doing assembly.

My problem with zachtronics games like TIS-1000 is two fold:<p>1) just give me a real ide (my issue with pico8 as well)?<p>2) If I&#x27;m going to play a game that&#x27;s close to doing FPGA stuff why not just learn to program an FPGA, that would be more useful

Looks cool, but coding games never appealed to me. There are plenty of real coding things I could do to scratch that itch.

TIS-100 is a great teaching tool for multi-core programming which pretends to be a game at the same time.

TIS-100 is great, i just wish it wouldn&#x27;t use 100% CPU on Mac all the time.

after work as an embedded systems engineer, I play a game where I am an embedded systems engineer<p>10&#x2F;10 asm is life

I don&#x27;t have anything to add other than that TIS-100 is fantastic and everyone here should give it a try!

I still have strong memories of spending hours planning and iterating on the distributed sorting alg challenge.

Opus Magnum is a good entry point. If not that then Last BBS. I know most his games but only dedicated myself to these two. I’m trying to “finish” the main stories and then move to TIS100 or Shenzen

If you&#x27;re here, you enjoy zachtronics games. We talk a lot about their programming games, but also check out Eliza, the visual Novel they made. It&#x27;s great.

A good zach-like everyone should check out it &quot;the signal state&quot; on steam.<p>This game is great, but is geared more towards digital logic instead of coding.

If only the iOS version worked with a goddamn keyboard. I check again every 6 months or so.

Every single game of theirs is a gem in every way and I just hope they decide to make more.

This game and shenzen i&#x2F;o inspired me to become a software developer.

I had a lot of fun with this, can recommend!

Unfortunately, a closed game studio

(2015)