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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();
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.
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?
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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.
John
... 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.
Can someone make a Tetris game that drops actual physical blocks down? Maybe on pulleys. Bonus points if filled rows actually explode.
why spend thousands of dollars and use up half your house for some you could easily do with a $5 Rasberry Pi Zero?
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Because he can and because he presumably enjoyed doing so.
It's the same reason some hobbyists still photograph with 19th-century film technology and it's part of the reason some amateur radio operators still use Morse Code (well, that, and because it may work when other ways of communicating over radio won't work as well, as efficiently, or at all under a given set of conditions).
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.
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.
Why collect cars, trade cards, go fishing, hiking, play games, etc, etc? Because it's something you enjoy!
In this instance he built something that he was able to share with others and hey, it's pretty cool as well :)
imagine a Beowulf cluster of those !
If we do, it would be called Colossus and be built inside a mountain with Gamma ray traps all around it.. and we all know what that leads to..
I am totally jealous.
WTF? How on earth can you build a computer from scratch by buying a pre-build computer for $5?
Or do you actually think the purpose of this was to play tetris?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Now, now, now... even the copyright industry didn't try to make the bible copyrighted.
Although... Copyright is lifetime of the author + 70 years. How does this work with immortal beings? Is it possible to file suit on behalf of someone? Jewish God vs. Roman Catholic Church et al (the rest of the different flavors of zombie jesus freaks, essentially), over copyright on the bible. After all, the original author is still alive, being a being that transcends space and time.
I don't want to be the judge that has to say that either that god doesn't exist (at least not in the form propagated in the bible) or that the various christian churches have to stop publishing the old testament. But I sure want to read that verdict!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For his next project he plans to make an IWatch the size of the Chrysler Building.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
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
But where would I set up my bed? On a bright note, at 500W per unit, I wouldn't need a heating system.
hmmm -- might I suggest this is a topic for a modern James May to bring this subject to life?
why spend thousands of dollars and use up half your house for some you could easily do with a $5 Rasberry Pi Zero?
why do anything at all, you can experience everything you want by simply watching someone else do it online.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's Turing complete, so yes.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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
You have to grant that his tetris game is moving very fast, he probably has the timing connected to the speed of his megaprocessor and at that point in the video has it set at max.
But even allowing for that, he isn't exactly playing well.
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.
"Although... Copyright is lifetime of the author + 70 years. How does this work with immortal beings? Is it possible to file suit on behalf of someone? Jewish God vs. Roman Catholic Church et al (the rest of the different flavors of zombie jesus freaks, essentially), over copyright on the bible. After all, the original author is still alive, being a being that transcends space and time."
The bible would not settle this issue. The authors are undisputed humans that are all long since dead regardless of who they were (which is disputed). god is alleged only to have inspired those authors and the copyright goes to the author and not his muse.
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
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Uh... I don't know if that's really so undisputed. At the very least that 10 commandment part is often claimed that it has been done by the big cheese himself.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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??
Nope, Moses wrote those based on conversations with a burning bush. At least according to the bible. I know lots of things like to depict it like the stone is being zapped by god and shaped in movies and such but that is all theatrical drama. He talked to the bush and chiseled the commandments himself.
If you weren't paying your assistant, your assistant would hold the copyright on a dictated letter not you. You only get the copyright because it's produced as a work for hire. It isn't even made clear from the text if the commandments are even a quotation and god didn't send Moses back down off the mountain with a sack of gold for the work.
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.
I guess one could argue that the so called "prophets" are doing "the Lord's work", i.e. can be considered to be employed by that god. And monetary compensation for their subjects has never really been big with churches, they usually get away with giving out "His love" or similar rather intangible assets, which is considered sufficient compensation by those "chosen ones".
Worked for religions throughout the ages. I guess we can thus assume with sufficient evidence that, at least according to the bible, which has not been challenged by anyone who could (i.e. Moses in this case, because nobody else was around when the burning bush talked to him... and I have a hunch even if there had been anyone around, the stories would probably diverge), that the originator of the ten commandments was the hallucination, I mean, god in the form of a burning bush, and that Moses was just, as it's often called, "The Lord's tool".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.