Dropship Chess
Fri Sep 01 2017tags: project
Dropship Chess
September 2017
A game built for the the Jack computer, a computer we build ourselves from scratch (NAND gates) as part of the (excellent) course From NAND to Tetris.
It's chess played on a 6x6 board where captured enemy pieces can be "airdropped" anywhere on the board in lieu of moving a piece, kind of like Shogi/Bughouse. White starts with two knights and Black with two bishops—so you have to capture the opponent's knights/bishops to get your own.
NAND To Tetris is an excellent overview of computer architecture. You start with a NAND gate and build full adders and mutliplexers from it. You then build basic processing and storage devices (ALU, RAM , CPU, display). Then you build an assembler, then a VM, then an interpreter, then a full-fledged parser/lexer and compiler for a high level language called Jack, and finally you write the OS for the computer in Jack! At the end of the course you've built a computer which supports a high-level language and can run a highly nontrivial program (Tetris) starting only from NAND gates. Awesome!