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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();
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!
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
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.
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.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
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.
No, you're thinking of the MOnSter 6502. The Megaprocessor has its own instruction set, with 4 (semi-)general purpose registers (some load and store instructions can only use R0 or R1 as the register source/destination and R2 or R3 as an index register).
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.
When I was somewhat younger, I was a so-called field engineer responsible for keeping some discrete element computers running.
Here's a picture of a module. This would be a single logic element such as a flip-flop, NAND gate, OR, etc.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/2...
The CPU cabinet was a huge box full of these things. The I/O controllers were in another cabinet, and the memory was in another cabinet.
The other boxes (storage, printers, card readers) had these same modules in them.
I never was main support for a CPU using those modules, but had some peripherals that had those things inside.
In more modern computers, these modules were replaced by logic cards. A PCB would have the transistors/diodes, etc to make a single element such as NAND gates, flip-flops or whatever, and these cards might have as many as 4 or even 6 logic elements on a single card. woo-eee!
I was lucky to be supporting such modern machines.
These old machines required hand-tuning such as manually synchronizing the clock signals between the near and far part of the cabinets.
The oldest machine I had to maintain was an 80 column card reader that used mechanical relays for all the logic elements. That was so long ago that the nightmares have stopped.
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.
of course England.. if it was one of the others THEN it would need to be specified :)
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.