Crosstalk: Second Reality
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31 announcements · from Crosstalk: Second Reality’s Steam news feed
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| Published | Kind | Announcement | Build |
|---|---|---|---|
| Community | Hardware Sniffers: The MISC architecture The M inimal I nstruction S et C omputer is a 32-bit Sail-validated instruction set architecture created very early in the development of the various parts that comprise Crosstalk, specifically to perform daily computing operations without unnecessary overhead and complexity. MISC defines an array of processor opcodes, flags, and memory rules that dictate how a conforming processor is interface… | — | |
| Community | Hardware Sniffers: About Hardware Sniffers is a MISC-native game that attempts to teach people enough about computer architecture and numbers that they'd have no problem reading memory dumps and recognizing hex patterns at a glance, esp. alignment, pointers, structs, and hex-ASCII conversion. It convers the following learning tracks: · Numbers · Radix · Endian · Width · Magnitude · Shape · Patterns · Strings · Spot · R… | — | |
| Release | The "Second Reality" Dev log #12 Hey there! The original 1993 "Second Reality" demo by the Future Crew is coming as a free DLC, usable from within the DANGLING kernel. Credit to the Future Crew and its members involved in the original demo: Psi, Trug, Wildfire, Purple Motion, Skaven, Marvel, Pixel, Gore, Abyss Video: It took me quite a bit to get the music playing since FC modified the STMIK. The solution turned ou… | — | |
| Release | The first MISC-native game, Hardware Sniffers, is coming shortly The first game native to the MISC architecture will be released one day after the game releases and will serve as a mandatory gate to two other pieces of DLC. | — | |
| Release | The roadmap and the DLC strategy DLC announced for Crosstalk will serve as a public roadmap during the Early Access phase of development. Incidentally, another benefit falling out of that is that players will be able to pick what they want to use and preserve storage on what they don't. Most DLC will be free. | — | |
| Community | Unannouncing Linux support Hello, I decided to remove the announced Linux support for Crosstalk. The latest build doesn't link statically, and I will not ship it with dynamic linking except where necessary, such as with the Steamworks SDK, which is only provided as a shared object. Distros mostly ship shared objects and I am not recompiling every dependency right now. Linux support is thereby postponed. Thank you | — | |
| Steam news | Discord testing is open and accepting new players Hey there! Crosstalk's early testing is currently open and ready to accept new players. If you'd like to participate, then please join the Discord server: . As always, if you like the game, then don't forget to wishlist to stay tuned: Thanks! | — | |
| In-game event | Linux support is in Having cleared some minor obstacles that were preventing Crosstalk from running on Linux, it's now scheduled for a Linux release on the same day as the Windows version. | 24934181 | |
| Community | The demo PCB is done Hello. As posted about a month ago, Crosstalk was postponed because I couldn't validate that the PCB export functionality was working correctly. Many things related to Crosstalk's timeline and initial content have changed since, but I still wanted to post about the result. The fabricator's finally done the board and has sent QC images over (and will ship two instances of the board + components… | — | |
| Major update | MISC has an LLVM backend Dev log #11 Hello. This dev log brings news about a much larger addition to the Crosstalk ecosystem and outside of it than nearly everything before. My ISA, MISC , and the processor for it, DLU , which now supports my kernel, DANGLING , is now supported by my custom LLVM backend, which basically means that a large portion of UNIX-native C code can be compiled (assembled and linked, too) for MIS… | 24887431 | |
| Major update | Emulation is here! Dev log #10 Hey there! Emulation is now in the version of Crosstalk that's slowly coming to Early Access. With emulation, designs can run much faster, trading structural accuracy for a behavioral one, which is cheaper to compute. I am still testing it and there are some issues, but as a benchmark, I tested my Steam-purchased copy of DOOM, which was able to run at 60MHz under emulation (200MHz a… | 24816153 | |
| Community | Initial Early Access final feature set Crosstalk will initially release into Early Access without EDA features (like PCB design) initially mentioned in some of the posts and the store page. The features are finished on the mathematical level but not yet in a presentable state. The plan was to start with those, but has since shifted heavily toward FPGAs and RTL in general. To those who initially tuned in for the EDA: the pro EDA lice… | — | |
| Community | "Affinity, my dear Watson" Dev log #9 Hey there. Well, it turns out that I'm stupid or something. One bug in my utility library, LDG, violently reduced performance, which wasn't clear until something pushed it, a little something such as Crosstalk's simulators. Apparently, nearly two years ago when I first started writing the library, I decided that individual programs would use singular thread pools. Well, in Crosstalk,… | — | |
| Community | Synthesizers Dev log #n+1 ( where n is the index of the last log ) Hello. This particular log is not bringing any concrete feature to the game. Instead, I want to share something that I thought about and would like to build for Crosstalk. Having existing interest in synthesizers, I was listening to this video (not affiliated with the author): I was working on the Crosstalk C emitter to make custom SystemVer… | — | |
| Community | About the city-builder Hello, Steam. Yesterday there were some changes on Crosstalk's store page. Originally, it opened by describing Crosstalk as a sandbox in which you could build PCB cities. However, as I was creating the visual effects for it last week and the week prior, I didn't like what I was seeing. It didn't match the vision that I had for something that you'd call a "cool-looking circuit board city." Tryin… | — | |
| Major update | "But can it run DOOM?" Dev log #7 Hello, everyone! This dev log represents a huge milestone in the development of Crosstalk! Once I got my kernel to run natively purely within Crosstalk, I wanted to push the limits and show what it was capable of. I could think of a way none other than ... well, you saw the title. At first, things seemed bleak. Serial printed that graphics init'd, but there was no image, and the fram… | 24655422 | |
| In-game event | Display outputs Dev log #6 Hello. I've been thinking about building a small mini-game for Crosstalk over serial, but I wasn't sure how many people would enjoy a text-only experience, so I thought to myself that I could build a graphical display output. Crosstalk now contains three modes: CRT, gas-plasma, and LCD, which all look a bit different. The one I show below is gas-plasma in CGA mode (though VGA is also… | 24650546 | |
| Major update | The i386-compatible now runs within Crosstalk's GUI Dev log #5 Hey there. A big announcement today! A few days ago, I posted about Crosstalk being able to run my own kernel on an i386-compatible CPU. That is now also true for the main Crosstalk GUI application, where the CPU is running on the FPGA to the right, and the kernel (and its bootloader, which loads it into memory and jmp s to it, which is itself loaded by my custom BIOS) is running on… | 24639801 | |
| In-game event | Synthesized sound playback Dev log #5 Hey there. Bringing another FPGA feature: sound. It is now possible to output audio from FPGAs. In the video below, the main theme of the game is encoded in hex and synthesized by an FPGA in real time, which is also why you'll hear a distortion. This distortion is a clocking artifact (the FPGA doesn't run fast enough to feed enough audio to the output device) and will be improved ove… | — | |
| In-game event | FPGA support is in Dev log #4 Hello! In this dev log, I am presenting the mentioned FPGA support being completely integrated into Crosstalk. You can place an FPGA, describe its configuration using SystemVerilog, program it, and watch output in an in-game terminal emulator. A code editor modifying the configuration of the highlighted FPGA and a terminal emulator window showing the output of the serial_out port | 24609041 | |
| Major update | Crosstalk SystemVerilog support Hey there. This dev log is to demonstrate SystemVerilog support in Crosstalk (text mode-only, for now). You can describe a design in SystemVerilog, emit C of it, then run it as a processor (or other IC kind). The emitted C can run additional x86 code, such as an assembled kernel, which is what I show here: This video went to a new channel created for the game. If you'd like, then please sub. FP… | — | |
| Community | Crosstalk can now simulate an i386-compatible CPU Dev log #1 Hello. As promised in the immediately preceding community update, here is the first Crosstalk dev log. Earlier this week, I got a SystemVerilog-described 8086-compatible CPU running, but I don't have any interesting programs for it. 16-bit real mode was something I didn't particularly feel like doing, so I just had it print the standard "hello, world" and do some basic arithmetic. Th… | — | |
| Community | Starting dev logs Hello, everyone. From this post on, you will see development logs posted here, on Discord , and on YouTube , documenting milestones as they occur. These particular posts will be more conversational, as opposed to the non-dev log posts. Since Crosstalk signed up for Early Access, it'd be nice for the community to get a glimpse inside. The first log will be posted shortly. YouTube playlist: If yo… | — | |
| Community | Early Access release update Our fabricator is reporting that the export feature demo board is half-fabricated. Once that's done, it will go to assembly and hold until all components arrive, which could take longer than the fabrication itself; however, they already ordered them, so it shouldn't be long. A screenshot from the fabricator's order status GUI | — | |
| Community | Early Access We originally planned to release Crosstalk into 1.0 as a city-builder. It was to include real-world electronic components and let players build cities that they wanted, electrically valid or not. After some deliberation, especially after the postponement a few days ago due to a pending PCB delivery from a fabricator, we've decided to push the game into Early Access and make it something more th… | — | |
| Community | Pending export functionality validation The estimated release date of Crosstalk is being moved down the line. We haven't yet received the board shown in the trailer and the previous post, and we want to make sure that we validate it when it arrives and fix any possible minor issues. The fabricator tells us that the board should arrive around August 28. Upon Valve's approval, the release date will move to September 10. A fabricator ba… | — | |
| Community | Export and handle your city IRL The statement on our store page, "Cities built in Crosstalk represent structurally valid PCBs," is not an overstatement. Crosstalk will release with the ability to take your city into the real world. Should you design one that is also electrically valid (for example, while playing in Hard mode, though it's possible on all three difficulties), you will be able to plug it in and have it work! As… | — | |
| Announcement | Estimated release date announcement We're finishing the last pieces of the presentation layer of Crosstalk and are almost ready for release! We estimate that the game will be ready by August 10, 2026, and will be followed by one free DLC and one paid DLC within the next couple of months. In case you haven't yet and you find Crosstalk interesting, then please wishlist it via its store page: Thank you! | — |
Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.