If you want some modern day fun with this, try the Zachtronics programming games; TIS-100, Shenzhen I/O, and Exapunks.
Or, my personal favorite I only discovered somewhat recently, try Turing Complete. You start by designing all your logic gates from just a negate gate IIRC. You eventually build up an ALU and everything else you need and then create your own computer. Then you define your own assembly language and have to write programs in your assembly language that run on the computer you’ve designed to complete different tasks. It’s a highly underrated game, although it takes a certain type of person to enjoy.
Turing Complete looks really interesting! How polished is it? Just looked it up and saw it was in early access
I would say it’s very polished. It does everything you’d expect and has some nice QoL features. There was work on a big update that’d improve performance and things, but the last information about that was from Aug of last year as far as I can tell. That’s not a big deal though. The game works fine without it.
Thanks! I’ll try it out over 4th of July weekend!
Another interesting low-level interpreter/emulated system to look into for anyone else trying to get started with this type of thing is the CHIP-8! It’s a pretty basic 8/16-bit instruction set (there are 35 opcodes, the instructions themselves are mostly simple) and there are tons of detailed guides on making one and writing roms for them.