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Man Builds Giant Homemade Computer To Play Tetris (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: A man has finished building an enormous computer in the sitting room of his bungalow in Cambridge. James Newman started work on the "Megaprocessor," which is 33ft (10m) wide and 6ft (2m) high, in 2012. It does the job of a chip-sized microprocessor and Mr Newman has spent $53,000 creating it. It contains 40,000 transistors, 10,000 LED lights and it weighs around half a ton (500kg). So far, he has used it to play the classic video game Tetris. Mr Newman, a digital electronics engineer, started the project because he was learning about transistors and wanted to visualize how a microprocessor worked. The components all light up as the huge device carries out a task. Mr Newman hopes the Megaprocessor will be used as an educational tool and is planning a series of open days at his home over the summer. You can watch a video demonstration of the monstrosity here.
Why the Digital Equipment Corporation logo as the icon for this story (and other DIY stuff)?
Has /. gotten so young that nobody knows it means something more than just "digital", or has /. gotten so old that nobody remembers DEC?
do() || do_not();
Tetris Plays You
MP4 file that wont play currently.
Megaprocessor promptly died of slashdotting n/t
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
http://web.archive.org/web/20160705214332/http://www.megaprocessor.com/Images/megaprocessor-tour1-2mbps.mp4
I haven't seen a slashdotting in quite a while. I tried to dig up some mirrors (MirrorDot, CoralCDN, etc), but they're all dead now. Internet Archive to the rescue
Kilo-for-kilo, the cheapest hobby computer money can buy!
On other thought , folks at Bletchley Park would have summarily executed this person for building something to play tetris.
In b4 lawsuit from The Tetris Company LLC, who guard their product and trademark with a jealousy that makes Yaweh look like a hippy.
An educational tool to show how people waste money....
He built it because he could, of course, but he's planning on it becoming an educational display. It's just that a computer with no actual applications is a pretty boring thing for non-techies to behold.
John
This is a prime example of what should be on the site. Thanks )
Maybe he should have gone for Space Invaders?
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
imagine a Beowulf cluster of those !
Apparently, someone needs to up their meds...
... you really can build a mainframe from the things you find at home.
I could bet that Processing Units manufacturers (Intel, ATI/AMD, NVidia, ARM,etc.) had built things like this internally before, for years. just to understand better what they are doing.
Can any insider of those companies confirm or deny my conjecture, please?
Somebody else built a discrete-transistor 6502 processor.
And, of course, there's the non-integrated-circuit TTL 8008, although that was probably SSI or MSI, not discrete transistors.
Cambridge where?
The one in England comes to mind, but theres also one in MA (and in umpteen other staes
Theres even one in the Waikato (NZ)
...he's single.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
When I was a kid, I started designing a computer that could play tic-tac-toe using only mechanical relays. About the time I realized how many thousands of relays were required, I decided it wasn't worth the effort. I don't understand this guy's thought processes... why spend thousands of dollars and use up half your house for some you could easily do with a $5 Rasberry Pi Zero?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Can someone make a Tetris game that drops actual physical blocks down? Maybe on pulleys. Bonus points if filled rows actually explode.
Really nice construction.
I think the memory card with LED per bit is outstanding!!
You can do all that in one week with a bread board or two. You'll still learn as much.
...but can it play Crysis?
How can this be? An actual tech story on slashdot. Nothing about creationism, obese people, the lack of women in STEM or mass shootings. Maybe I'll see if it happens again tomorrow.
If you were really concerned about malware exposure, you'd be running NoScript.
One of NoScript's useful features is blocking ad-blocking access blocks.
Then you could RTFA safely if you cared to.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
The LEDs are the coolest part. I've had trouble seeing the video on his site since it's downloading very slowly, but I love what I'm seeing so far.
Stuff like this reminds me of RAM scanning and memory ripping back in my Amiga days. Since the Amiga had no MMU and the video chip could address the entire range of the machine's main "chip" RAM, it was popular to fiddle with the screen display and scan through system memory. You could actually watch your computer running programs in realtime. The Amiga also used planar graphics, so you could see individual bits, rather than bytes, as pixels, allowing you to identify which memory locations were used for counters, timers, disk control logic, mouse pointer coordinates, and more. I wrote a whole bunch of programs in AMOS Basic that let me directly edit memory by drawing on the screen, bubble sort graphics, visually highlight specific memory addresses used by games, and do all kinds of cool nonsense.
I miss those days when you could read any memory address without needing signed drivers and such. I've always wondered why memory visualization has totally disappeared. It might make for some interesting lessons in how modern programs actually use memory and how memory leaks happen.
Two words: 3D Printing (OK, the first word is arguably a mnemonic for two words, but close enough).
I am totally jealous.
I remember dreaming about working there when I was young. Such a bastion of computer engineering creativity and ingenuity of its time. So sorry that they got swallowed by HP, which is a husk of its former self.
... emulate it with software in a modern computer?
(Duck and cover)
How about doing the same with contactors instead of transistors? ...or water flowing on transparent pipes instead of electricity and PCBs?
(and "hydraulic-mechanic" transistors)
Just need to write a compiler from Verilog/VHDL to 3D printer output ;)
...slashdot news from the dinosaurs....
This is an impressive learning device.
The man should get a grant from some large software corp like MS or something to build a few of these and place them in education centers and science-museums.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Run Windows???
hmmm -- might I suggest this is a topic for a modern James May to bring this subject to life?
LOVE these sorts of Rube Goldberg machines!! Great educational tool for kids. Hope he donates to a children's computer museum.
in the video, i see display ram, but i did not hear or notice anything about core/process storage.
always wanted to do something like this myself - bravo, bis, encore.
So THIS is the guy getting all the bitcoins!
I chose to end my comments, not with a rim shot, but a long decaying F#7sus4
even the copyright industry didn't try to make the bible copyrighted.
All well-known translations of the Bible into modern English are copyrighted with a non-free license except one: the World English Bible.
This is very cool, but if the reason he did it was because "microprocessors were opaque" he should have just simulated it in Verilog or VHDL. Then he could follow all the operations he wanted at whatever detail he liked.
More of these types of articles please. These are the things mass media does not report.
necessary text
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
There is nothing unusual about it, to be sure, our world is full of computer genius. This event attracts only for the creation purpose. But do you really think that this Megaprocessor was made to play tetris??
He should have built it in Minecraft (like many others have done to various degrees) and saved himself 50 grand. Museums could have virtual tours of the thing:) Kids would love that. Put on your VR googles in the museum, and wander around the computer with your digital avatar, while a real person gives the tour to you via a headset.