It's pretty amazing how much stuff that the community has generated so rapidly. Lots of emulators, IDEs, compilers, code repositories, original software, ports of classic games, etc., have all reached a surprising level of maturity in only about a month.
Notch released an invented machine architecture - 0x10c. Many people who'd been thinking about these things (for romance, or 'cos they've written similar systems for uni assignments) have thrown energy at the specification. Hence, even though we only have a vague idea of what Notch is working on, there's a stack of VMs and related tooling for this invented architecture he's defined.
I'm excited about it. I was thinking about how I could create devices and arrange memory to talk to them on my walk in this morning.
I lost interest in videogames in my teens, because I felt that writing my own code was much more interesting than running someone else's programs (my own opinion, totally subjective). But gosh, this man is writing a game where the better coder you are, the better you perform in the game (that's my understanding of the programmable-starships thing). Woah -- i might be actually back on stage :-)
The Proper Way on Windows is a largely undocumented minefield strewn with broken glass and lack of a sane package managing system.
Personally, I require payment to even bother.
