Student showcase: Will it run Doom?
Have you ever built something you were really proud of in Minecraft? Say a house that turned out really nicely, perhaps even a clever moving contraption or two. In any step, along that process, did you ever find yourself wondering how far you could really push it?
Well Oliver thought so too. He had the sort of thought that stumbles its way out of your mind at three o’clock in the morning – fresh from the monkey’s typewriter – that you immediately relegate to the ‘that can’t be possible’ bucket. Oliver missed his bucket, badly. Badly enough to build a fully functioning, code-running computer…in Minecraft.
I’ve been sitting here for some time trying to put into words quite how absurd this is. The closest I’ve gotten is this: imagine you’re a physics student—a troubling thought I know, but hang in there it’s almost over—and you’ve upset your teacher. As such, for your final exam you are handed a circuit board, some wire, and about a thousand individual transistors and told in the next hour it needs to run Doom. Now imagine the look on your physics teacher’s face when it does.
I believe Mr H felt and looked an awful lot like that fictional physics teacher when Oliver in Year 10 returned with his ‘project’ – an 8 bit CPU built entirely from Minecraft redstone. Measuring in at a whopping 144,720m3, or the equivalent of around 60 Olympic sized swimming pools in volume, it is no small feat. Considering its size, it operates at a steady 10 second clock cycle, which may sound slow, but then again… feel free to try and make a faster one yourself.
This is the point where I would normally make some witty remark to do with pictures and thousands of words, but I think I’ll let this one speak for itself.
Lastly, a huge thank you to Oliver for letting me share your creation, and well done for making a truly impressive contraption.
– Quinn
Credit to Oliver for the screenshots.
For those of you who read my first sentence and disagreed, here are some more details:
- Implements 14 instructions from basic memory management to comparisons and logical operators.
- 8 Bit Von Neumann style CPU.
- 10 second clock cycle.
- Can run complete programs with, e.g.
FOR C <- 1 TO 3A <- A - CNEXT COUTPUT A
- Which would translate to:
0 LDD 2 <15>
1 INC 5 <ACC>
2 STO 3 <15>
3 LDD 2 <13>
4 SUB 6 <15>
5 STO 3 <13>
6 LDD 2 <15>
7 CMP 10 <14>
8 JPE 12 <10>
9 JMP 11 <0>
10 OUT 14 <13>
11 END 0 <0>
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