Minecraft Mod Adds Emulated 6502 Processor

New submitter Direwolf20 writes "The Red Power 2 mod for Minecraft has recently been updated, and it adds a fully emulated 6502 processor that can be programmed in assembly, but comes with a Forth interpreter. From the article: 'Eloraam calls it the 65EL02, because "it supports all the 6502, 65C02, and part of the 65C816 instruction set" as well as "a set of completely new instructions and two addressing modes. Since the 65EL02 is an 8-bit CPU, Eloraam didn't have as many options for programming environments as we have on today's 64-bit computers. While it's possible to program the 65EL02 in assembly language, for general use she chose to implement a Forth interpreter. Further technical information about RedPower Control's 65EL02 is available on Eloraam's blog RP Control Internals, and on the RedPower wiki's page for Red Power Control.' (Fair disclosure: The video linked in the article is mine.)"

At what point does 'improvement' become a downside

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My impression of the metagame that is Minecraft is that doing things the hard and/or rube-goldberg way is part of the charm. There is some reason why people are trying to build ALUs in crap redstone logic rather than just alt-tabbing to the logic circuit simulator of their choice(or a VM, or an emulator of some popular retro architecture).

Given that, at what point do mods that improve minecraft's program-ability go too far and turn it from a perverse simulation game of enormous popularity into a really dreadful IDE?

I'm in for 2!

[PopeRatzo]

Minecraft Mod Adds Emulated 6502 Processor

Nothing says "fun in gaming" like a 6502 processor emulator. When I'm sitting down to play games, I often find myself thinking, "God, I wish I could do some assembly-language programming in this game". I don't think there's any question that was the biggest weakness of Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare 3: Black Ops - there were no emulated 8-bit processors.

And there are actually some out there who don't understand why computer geeks are sometimes the butt of jokes.

Re:I'm in for 2!

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

Yes, programmers shouldn't program in their off time, just like artists shouldn't draw and singers shouldn't sing. Which, unfortunately, a lot of people believe.

"What are you doing?" parents and peers always say. "You're wasting your life." And they keep doing it because they want to.

I say screw people like you, and more power to people like them.