Tiny Logic

Tiny Logic looks like a pixel-art toy with a battery, a switch and an LED, but it plays like an electronics course that ends with a computer running DOOM. Nothing in the simulation is faked: voltage, current and transistors behave the way their real counterparts do, so a wrong wire shows up as a dead circuit instead of a polite hint. This text covers what the first lessons look like, where players get stuck, and how far the sandbox really goes.

Battery, Switch and LED: The First Lessons in Tiny Logic

You start with three parts: a battery, a switch and an LED. Your guide, a character in an olive three-piece suit, walks you through 30 hands-on lessons that take you from lighting that first LED all the way up to a working CPU. No electronics background is required, and the pace is deliberately small-step, so nothing asks you to guess.

LEDs here can burn out. Push too much current through one and it is gone.

After the first lit LED, the lessons move on to wiring up transistors and turning them into logic gates, then keep stacking gates into larger machines. Each gate you place is simulated, which means every computer you build actually computes. That is the heart of the game: you are not watching a scripted demonstration, you are building the thing that does the work.

The Parts Bin and the Mistakes Everyone Makes

The parts list is wider than the opening lessons suggest. Once you move past the battery and switch, you can reach for these components:

• Resistors, capacitors and diodes for shaping current and voltage
• Relays and motors for switching and movement
• NPN transistors plus N-channel and P-channel MOSFETs for building gates
• Oscilloscopes and keyboards for watching signals and feeding in input

The classic beginner mistake is forgetting that an LED needs its current limited, then wondering why a part that lit up a moment ago has died. Another is mixing up N-channel and P-channel MOSFETs, which switch on opposite conditions in real electronics and do the same here. Because the simulation is honest, wiring errors are loud rather than quietly forgiven.

Players who already know electronics should still run the lessons in order, since the lessons teach how this specific toolset behaves. Students and curious tinkerers usually gain the most from the early steps, while programmers coming from code tend to enjoy the gates once they see the logic mapped onto physical wires.

Buses, Memory and Pixel Screens: Scaling Up in Tiny Logic

By the time you reach buses, the game stops feeling like a handful of parts and starts feeling like a machine. Buses can be up to 64 bits wide, and you can add memory, keyboards, oscilloscopes and pixel screens up to 256×256. A screen that finally lights up with something you wired yourself is a very particular kind of reward.

Once your first gate cluster becomes a chip, building changes character. You can turn any circuit into a chip, give it a custom look in the chip studio, and drop it into anything else you make. That is how a sprawling mass of wires becomes a tidy design, and it is the community’s shorthand for building a CPU from transistors up.

Sharing is built in too. A whole project can travel as a single file, and a chip can be copied as a share code you paste into any chat. Even very large circuits are designed to stay smooth, which matters once your builds grow beyond a few dozen parts.

TINY-32, the Assembler and the DOOM Question

The built-in assembler with autocomplete lets you write programs for your own CPU and load them straight into memory. That closes the loop between hardware and software: you design the machine, then you tell it what to do. Many players find this the most satisfying stretch of the game, because the machine you wired from scratch is suddenly running your instructions.

The showcase is TINY-32, a full 32-bit RISC-V computer made of 93,338 transistors. It passes the official RISC-V test suite and runs real DOOM at full speed, with no emulator involved. The circuit on screen is the computer, and the TINY-32 build and its DOOM port are shared openly, so you can drag the machine in, drop DOOM onto its memory, flip the power switch and play.

There is an honest debate about whether this counts as a game or a learning tool. There is no score and no win screen, and your goals are mostly the ones you set yourself. The project is also still in development, so expect rough edges, and Windows security tools sometimes flag the download as suspicious, which the developer’s page explains as a false positive. If you want a clear finish line, this may not suit you, but if you want to understand how a computer works, there is nothing else quite like it.

Questions About Tiny Logic Before You Start

These are the three questions that come up most for newcomers, and the answers apply from the first lesson onward.

1. Do I need electronics knowledge to play? No. The 30 lessons start with a battery, a switch and an LED, and your guide in the olive suit introduces transistors and logic gates one small step at a time. By the end you will have built a working CPU without any prior background.
2. Can Tiny Logic really run DOOM? Yes. TINY-32, a 32-bit RISC-V computer built from 93,338 transistors, runs real DOOM at full speed with no emulator. You drop the DOOM port onto the computer’s memory, flip the power switch and play.
3. How do I share a chip I designed? Turn the circuit into a chip, then copy it as a share code and paste it into any chat. If you want to send everything, a whole project can be shared as a single file instead.

Tiny Logic rewards patience more than speed. The path from the first LED to TINY-32 is long, but every lesson adds a real skill, and the moment DOOM boots on a machine you wired yourself is hard to forget. Start with the battery and the switch, respect the current limit, and let the olive-suited guide pull you toward the CPU one gate at a time.