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Man Builds Giant Homemade Computer To Play Tetris (bbc.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the classic-arcade-games dept.

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.

6 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. DEC Logo as icon? by devphaeton · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

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  2. Video mirror by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  3. He did NOT build it "to play tetris" by plover · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    John
  4. Re:site is tanked by plover · · Score: 4, Informative

    He uploaded them to YouTube a few days ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... is the grand tour. From there, you can find links to the other videos.

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    John
  5. Similar to the MOnSter6502 by Guy+Harris · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Do Processing unit makers build alikes? by localroger · · Score: 4, Informative
    This is actually the way real computers were built in the 1950's and most of the 1960's. Integrated circuits weren't invented until the late 1960's, and integrated microprocessors in the mid-1970's. Before that if you had a computer, it was built like this (or even more primitively, with vacuum tubes and delay lines for memory). Although this video doesn't mention it the Megaprocessor is actually a clone of the 6502, based on the reverse engineering of that chip which was done by the visual6502 people. Actual discrete transistor designs were a bit more streamlined to reduce the discrete component count.

    The people who built early microprocessors mostly didn't bother emulating them first because they had a lot of experience with discrete design; processors were not mysterious to them and they had confidence that they knew what would work. The 6502 was in fact laid out entirely by hand directly in MOS masks, not more abstract circuit diagrams, and had to be reverse engineered in our day because no record remained of how its fine features worked.

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