SHENZHEN I/O

Perhaps my favorite Zachtronics game. My day job is firmware engineering and somehow this captures just the fun parts of the job.

You need brain and that's the thing that I don't have.

> Moved to China for a better life and to contribute to electronic hardware innovation > Found myself writing pseudo-assembly to control RGB LEDs on a vape pen for a client wtf is my life cost is down though 10/10

Великолепный симулятор работы. Я сам программист, и таски тут иногда поинтереснее реальных задач. Документация — 10/10. Вот бы на реальной работе так же чётко описывали задачу и ожидаемый результат. Местный пасьянс тоже 10/10, между делом отличная разрядка. Я играл в этот шедевр ассемблерного проектирования ещё до своего первого устройства на работу, будучи в университете. Получил неплохой опыт работы с технической документацией благодаря этой игре. Звуки приятные, есть даже сюжет у тасков. Отдельно радует таблица результатов выполнения задачи — видишь, насколько ты плох или хорош относительно других игроков. Если любишь прогать, особенно низкоуровневое, и получаешь удовольствие от сборки микросхем на коленке — эта игра самое то. Лучший образовательный симулятор для тех, кто не боится ассемблера, документации на сотню страниц и китайских процессоров. 10/10 в своём жанре.

Assembly language micro controller programming. I managed the beat the solitaire.

the puzzles in this game are NOT easy but damn do i feel smart when i figure them out. the solitaire game is pretty tough too but also incredibly addicting. just one more try, i'm sure i'll get it this time...

Playing the game to procrastinate from my real work, in which, I am playing the solitaire minigame to again procrastinate from "work" of solving coding puzzles. I really liked the game, the vibes, the manual everything feels very nice. Its just the amount of information I was lacking from the game, that I had to read up was more than the amount I expected/wanted from a game. Still recommended if one is ever looking for a programming puzzle game, as it was satisfying to go through the puzzles, it just was not satisfying to go through the manual and just reading on the net what a piece actually does and expects but the amount of time I spent playing is worth the price.

I like this kind of games, and I like that one has to deal with an incomplete manual as they way to interact with the game, but the tooling to learn and experiment is just bad. It is very difficult to debug when you can't easily see the signals that are moved around, and when you can't play around and send your own signals. If this game had good debug tools, it would probably among my favorites, but without them it becomes a slog...

Highly recommended. Reminds me of the days when working as an engineer on circuit and software design but with constraints on available instructions, register, memory that few engineers nowadays may have experienced. Am interested to see how people could achieve with exceptionally low cost, low power consumption and few lines of instruction.

Most standard programming puts me to sleep. Sitting at a desk writing high level software or clicking through industrial PLC ladder logic all day isn't why I got into engineering. I prefer systems with physical weight—diagnosing actual mechanical faults, and designing machines that actually move. But SHENZHEN I/O is different. This isn't just a coding simulator; it’s a masterclass in bare-metal machine code. It captures the exact, unfiltered reality of hardware-software integration. You aren't relying on libraries to do the heavy lifting. You are fighting for physical space on a circuit board, managing power constraints, and shuffling data through a single accumulator bottleneck just to make a piece of silicon function. It trains your brain to think in raw state machines, conditional skips, and register-level logic. 10/10. It will permanently rewire how you look at physical machinery.