Some Assembly Required

I recently took a class in Computer Organization. A number of topics pertinent to game programmers were discussed in the course including:

- Assembly Instructions
- The Memory Hierarchy
- Pipelining/Parallelism

Like most classes which explore assembly code the instruction set was MIPS. MIPS is generally considered the best assembly language to learn first, at least before x86. As someone who enjoys tackling low level problems, getting a better understanding of how C/C++ code is actually translated into machine instructions was very interesting to me.

One of the projects for the class was writing Connect 4 entirely in assembly.

This was surprisingly informative and fun to write.  Since I hope to explore asm { } inside C++ and x86 in the near future this was a good first step in that direction.  You can download the source code here.  If you have access to a RSIM on your machine, you will almost certainly need to adjust the paths in the makefile to the appropriate directories.