I just wanted to show you the 16bit computer I've been building with redpower over the pas few months.
I know redpower is regarded as cheating by most, but I hope that some might still find it interesting - it was a pain in the butt to build regardless of redpower :smile.gif:
Just to get the numbers out of the way: It is a fully functional computer with 10 instructions, 32 bytes of ram, 64 bytes of rom, user input, numerical output and (of course) the 16x16 pixel graphics display.
In total this took around two weeks to build. I started back in december but had it collecting dust until this week when I finally got around to finish it.
The CPU is sort of inspired by the MIPS architecture - mainly the fact that most instructions allow you to specify the target register, instead of the destination register being fixed to one of the source registers or to a special register like the accumulator, for example.
The command set has a few quirks, mainly that the program counter is in fact just a normal register that you can read from and write to, just as you would with any other register. This means that there aren't any jump instructions, since you can write to the program counter with any of the move instructions (or even the arithmetic instructions).
Since conditional branches are required for most programs, these are of course implemented. But instead of just having conditional jumps, all of the instructions are augmented with a condition code, allowing their conditional execution (I had bits left over in the instruction encoding, so I thought that would be pretty neat).
Have a few pictures:
I have a short video with a quick tour and showing the thing in action:
In theory I could run pong on this (and I originally planned to do that), but I would have had to build a lot more ROM and the program would be extremely slow, so I dropped the idea and went for a DVD-screensaver-ish program instead.
If anyone is interested, I'll try to upload the map somewhere so you can take a look. Note that I'm still using 1.7.3, since that was the only version I could get redpower to run on back then.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.
Cheers!
You should try it with a mod that will make redstone ticks faster. i saw one the other day that made it 16 times the speed. then maybe you can play pong!
even though this uses red power, it is still one of the best builds i have seen ever, if you did not use red power, the machine would be so big that you would have to install a mod to get a bot to stand somewhere so that all of the chunks were being updated anyway. +2 for u!
You should try it with a mod that will make redstone ticks faster. i saw one the other day that made it 16 times the speed. then maybe you can play pong!
How can this really be that slow?! The computers without redpower are faster...
The problem aren't the redstone ticks, it's the fact that even my i7 can't handle the thing running. In theory it would only take between 5-40 redstone ticks per cycle (depending on the instruction) so it would actually run at a pretty decent speed, but Minecraft lags so hard it takes ages for programs to complete.
It is a real shame that it is made using mods, maybe people would react better in the modding discussion forum?
To be honest, I don't entirely get the bad reactions. While I do realize that this certainly isn't nearly as big an accomplishment as building everything with vanilla redstone, I still had to design a CPU with all attached peripherals and build it by hand. It's not like redpower comes with a CPU block :smile.gif:
I just wanted to show you the 16bit computer I've been building with redpower over the pas few months.
I know redpower is regarded as cheating by most, but I hope that some might still find it interesting - it was a pain in the butt to build regardless of redpower :smile.gif:
Just to get the numbers out of the way: It is a fully functional computer with 10 instructions, 32 bytes of ram, 64 bytes of rom, user input, numerical output and (of course) the 16x16 pixel graphics display.
In total this took around two weeks to build. I started back in december but had it collecting dust until this week when I finally got around to finish it.
The CPU is sort of inspired by the MIPS architecture - mainly the fact that most instructions allow you to specify the target register, instead of the destination register being fixed to one of the source registers or to a special register like the accumulator, for example.
The command set has a few quirks, mainly that the program counter is in fact just a normal register that you can read from and write to, just as you would with any other register. This means that there aren't any jump instructions, since you can write to the program counter with any of the move instructions (or even the arithmetic instructions).
Since conditional branches are required for most programs, these are of course implemented. But instead of just having conditional jumps, all of the instructions are augmented with a condition code, allowing their conditional execution (I had bits left over in the instruction encoding, so I thought that would be pretty neat).
Have a few pictures:
I have a short video with a quick tour and showing the thing in action:
In theory I could run pong on this (and I originally planned to do that), but I would have had to build a lot more ROM and the program would be extremely slow, so I dropped the idea and went for a DVD-screensaver-ish program instead.
If anyone is interested, I'll try to upload the map somewhere so you can take a look. Note that I'm still using 1.7.3, since that was the only version I could get redpower to run on back then.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.
Cheers!
Yeah, too bad real redstone isn't like that.
Okay!
The problem aren't the redstone ticks, it's the fact that even my i7 can't handle the thing running. In theory it would only take between 5-40 redstone ticks per cycle (depending on the instruction) so it would actually run at a pretty decent speed, but Minecraft lags so hard it takes ages for programs to complete.
To be honest, I don't entirely get the bad reactions. While I do realize that this certainly isn't nearly as big an accomplishment as building everything with vanilla redstone, I still had to design a CPU with all attached peripherals and build it by hand. It's not like redpower comes with a CPU block :smile.gif: