Ted! We met years ago when you visited Truven for a MapR sale. Really awesome to see you here. :)
Many of the issues you're bringing up popped into my head when I started working with Carson on the project. But they've ended up being not a big deal. The machine is more than powerful enough to get through the lower level CS courses while being simple enough to be blindly obvious about how it all works.
We're also cheating in a few areas like compiling graphics to a separate ROM space to keep the memory usage down.
Carson and I have already chatted about eventually needing an MTMC-32 for Operating System Design classes. That would be the computer where Interrupts, TLBs, cache levels, pipelining, MMIO, block devices, etc, etc, etc would make sense. They'll be able tp build the Operating System themselves and figure out how to make it all work. And ideally share software with each other that they can compiler for their OS. (Like a TinyGo :))
IMHO, this is an important step toward a suite of educational tools for the future.
There’s a built-in assembly editor with highlighting and intellisense autocomplete. Super easy to get started with coding assembly. AND you can run assembly directly from the command line. e.g. Type in “li t0 42” and 42 will be loaded into the t0 register.
Just pull up the Machine Specification for the full list of instructions and try it out!
Fun Fact: You can pass your starting patterns into the Life program. There are a bunch in /data. And you can make your own as long as they end in .cells