5 ms·
Minecraft HDL, an HDL for Redstone
- dang 11mo agoRelated: Verilog to Minecraft Redstone Synthesizer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25195802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25195802 - Nov 2020 (12 comments) (Reposts are fine after a year or so! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
- paulwetzel 11mo agoSuper cool project :) Just the right level of, objectively useless - but really fun!
- throwaway290 11mo agoMinecraft circuits can't have feedback? That's pretty sad:(
- melncat 11mo agoThey can. It's just that this specific program is not capable of translating it.
- throwaway290 11mo agoI couldn't find any examples by googling, give one?
- rbits 11mo agohttps://minecraft.wiki/w/Redstone_circuits/Memory https://minecraft.wiki/w/Redstone_circuits/Memory
- throwaway290 11mo agoCtrl F "feedback" = nothing
- Aromasin 11mo agoCheck out this persons' YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@sammyuri/videos https://www.youtube.com/@sammyuri/videos You wouldn't be able to do any of that without feedack.
- throwaway290 11mo agoOK. I thought feedback was more like that analog thing in electricity where you plug thing into itself and it amplifies but I guess it's also used in memory circuts
- regularfry 11mo agoHave a look at the diagram for https://minecraft.wiki/w/Redstone_circuits/Memory#Input_stabilization_with_reset https://minecraft.wiki/w/Redstone_circuits/Memory#Input_stab.... It's doing exactly that.
- throwaway290 11mo agoagain this is showing memory and not the analog feedback behavior I thought about...
- oasisaimlessly 11mo agoThey're (approximately) one and the same. * Feedback causes memory-like effects (e.g. reverb and oscillation whine in audio systems). * Besides maybe memresistors, memory is pretty much always implemented via positive feedback (i.e. >unity loop gain) plus some sort of saturation to prevent exponential growth (which you typically get for free in physical systems if you can keep them from exploding). Furthermore, digital behavior is an emergent effect from analog physical systems that are designed to be bistable. Digital systems will always make use of analog physical processes "under the hood".
- 8note 11mo agoOptimizing passes for this would be interesting. Describing a flip flop as a villager minecart with some number of NaN minecarts beside it seems challenging to pick when to use it vs a copper bulb.
- gatane 11mo agoAmazing project!!
- lesser-shadow 11mo ago[dead]
- sodikidos 11mo ago[dead]
- Arch-TK 11mo agoThis is an amazing timeline. I still remember the day redstone was added to Minecraft. I spent the entire evening and many days afterwards on the forum brainstorming how to implement various things. I think I had one of the first if not the first T flip flop, it "took an entire room" and was slow. It has been crazy watching things get compacted, repeaters getting added, pistons, comparators. I remember when BUDs got discovered and then eventually just added as a block. Now* we have an entire HDL. I honestly stopped keeping track of things around 2012 so I am completely lost looking at modern redstone contraptions. *8 years ago
- Dylan16807 11mo agoThis is a cool tool but compared to modern redstone contraptions this is a sidegrade, not an upgrade. It's straightforward torch and dust logic, with each torch being a nor gate and dust being wires. And it doesn't consider timing at all. This could have been made the week redstone was added (with minor adjustments to not have repeaters), and it wouldn't have taken any newer insights.
- Arch-TK 11mo agoAh, damn. I was envisioning something limited but not this limited.
- Dilettante_ 11mo agoI haven't looked at the code, but you could presumably extend it, or maybe expect further development on the logic? ->The repo says "Branch out from master and have fun!"
- Dylan16807 11mo agoFor what it's for, it's better that it's simple.
- johnisgood 11mo agoI loved redstone. At some point it got forked and the fork was named "redpower" if I remember correctly. Good stuff. There were other great mods (I forgot the name, something that has to do with turtles?) and I remember implementing a shell in Lua, among other things.
- Sweepi 11mo ago> A 2-bit 7-segment display decoder in action (the display itself was not generated by MinecraftHDL) Lame!(/s) I did this vanilla Minecraft(1.12?), including the display itself.
- eirikbakke 11mo agoIn case anyone needs a minimal CPU implementation in 65 lines of Verilog: https://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/fic/ https://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/fic/ https://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/fic/code/Fic.v https://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/fic/code/Fic.v (I wonder if it would convert cleanly to a redstone circuit...)
- lpribis 11mo agoThis compiler does not support sequential logic, meaning no flip flops/registers.
- verdverm 11mo agoI wonder if this takes account of any of the quirks or quasi-connectivity in redstone? Mumbo Jumbo recently got a lesson in, and made a video about, computational redstone. Some seriously impressive builds in there (like ms paint). One of the major design constraints is tick/lag. The recent addition of copper bulbs turned the t-flipflop into a single block solution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTZaUz8bYW8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTZaUz8bYW8
- rbits 11mo agoIt seems to only use redstone dust, repeaters, and torches. So quasi-connectivity wouldn't affect it
- thedougd 11mo agoI’ve been looking for any reason to relearn Verilog and this might give me my first idea. Such a cool idea. Thank you.
- SLWW 11mo agoI wrote a 8-bit ripple adder when I was 16 one night; I thought about this idea then but it seemed like a massive undertaking. With all the additional redstone items/capabilities however I could imagine most circuits could be more and more compact.. All in all, really cool
- Aromasin 11mo agoThe only reason I ended up persuing Electronic Engineering at University, or eventually becoming an FPGA Engineer, was because I spent way too many hours playing with redstone in Minecraft as a teenager. Seeing a Verilog compiler for Minecraft is like seeing my career come full circle.
- djmips 11mo ago(2017)