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Minecraft Enterprise and 16-Bit ALU

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the your-hobby-is-lame dept.

tekgoblin writes "Joshua Walker spent the last few months creating a masterpiece. He created the Starship Enterprise 1701-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation in Minecraft using just blocks. He recorded a short video of him explaining how he did it and even gave us a sneak peek at the partially completed ship." He also posted on the Penny-Arcade forums about how he did it. If you aren't impressed by that, perhaps you should check out a 16-Bit ALU also implemented in Minecraft which totally reminded me of one of my favorite XKCD comics.

12 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. by Nadaka · · Score: 4, Informative

    It is true. Massive block constructions and fluid flow logic were there first.

    1. Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. by yincrash · · Score: 2, Informative

      minecraft allows for unlimited power for the circuits using redstone wires. there was flow logic before redstone using falling sand, however, these types of circuits require you to refill the source of the flow (sand), every time you wanted a new computation done.

    2. Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. by Aladrin · · Score: 2, Informative

      Power may be unlimited, but scale isn't. Apparently there's a certain distance that Minecraft makes active, so he can't expand the system beyond that distance.

      --
      "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
    3. Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. by clone53421 · · Score: 2, Informative

      It shows a repeater on that wiki page that extends the range. Not surprisingly it also introduces a slight delay. You could extend the signal as far as you want with enough repeaters and as long as you’re willing to tolerate the delay.

      --
      Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
    4. Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. by Smidge204 · · Score: 2, Informative

      The purpose of the electrical stuff was obstinately for much simpler reasons: Control of in-game elements. Doors open/close when powered, power can set off explosives and alter the direction of mine cart tracks. You have buttons and levers and pressure plates to provide temporary power and the red torches provide constant power unless powered themselves.

      Boolean logic is just so simple that it doesn't take much more to implement a whole computer based on it.
      =Smidge=

    5. Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. by Nadaka · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yes. It uses OpenGL accelerated graphics tiles. The most common tileset is mayday.

      http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Graphics

      http://afteractionreporter.com/2010/04/02/new-version-of-dwarf-fortress-with-mayday-tileset/

    6. Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. by Neo+Quietus · · Score: 2, Informative

      No, there is a second limiting range, roughly 300 blocks or so. It is at this point that the chunk of land is taken out of memory and written to disk, so its state cannot change.

    7. Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. by Smidge204 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Even those this 16-bit alu is impressive I bet the reason his data bus is so long is to equalize all the bits so they come out at the same time.

      They DON'T come out at the same time. That's plainly evident in the video. It's not clear if the thing even has a clock generator.

      I was thinking about the difficulties regarding timing as well - especially important if he plans to add memory cells or anything with a shared bus. Some kind of buffer + "operation done" signal would be needed, since even careful planning to make equal-time circuits is no guarantee the game will calculate and update all paths at the proper times. Just makes it all the more impressive if he pulls it off, IMHO.

      Why the heck did he do a full adder when you could go with boolean logic and micro code.

      This statement makes me wonder if you actually understand what he did...
      =Smidge=

  2. Source for TFA by AltairDusk · · Score: 4, Informative

    TFA is sourced from this article at Ars which should (in theory) stay up so I recommend reading it there.

  3. Re:I watched the ALU video earlier today... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The ALU is from the "Hack" CPU described in this book: The Elements of Computing Systems, Building a Modern Computer from First Principles

  4. Minecraft Tux by ryanisflyboy · · Score: 2, Informative

    Some of our local LUG people have gotten bit by the minecraft bug. We've built a massive multiplayer island. Some of the locations include Lua Beach, Torvalds Torrent, FreeBSD falls, and Xen caverns. We also have logic gate fields, where members are working on a binary adder. Working already are various logic gates. One of our members built tux out of blocks (who also doubles as a water slide!).

    http://plug.org/mc_tux.png

    This game is soooo addicting. Don't get sucked in. The best phrase I've heard describe minecraft went something like this... This game is crap. It is full of bugs and nothing works. I hate it, hate it, hate it! I'm logging in right now.

  5. Re:Stop it, please! by Mr.+DOS · · Score: 2, Informative

    Don't write games in Java idiots.

    From what I understand, the speed issues of Minecraft are not so much due to Java but the poor OpenGL bindings available to Java applications. According to Notch (Minecraft's author), the engine computations themselves are only slightly slower than they would have been in C++.