HN Reader

The 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.

I 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

Related:

Verilog to Minecraft Redstone Synthesizer - 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)

This 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

In 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/code/Fic.v

(I wonder if it would convert cleanly to a redstone circuit...)

Super cool project :) Just the right level of, objectively useless - but really fun!

I 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

(2017)

I’ve been looking for any reason to relearn Verilog and this might give me my first idea.

Such a cool idea. Thank you.

Optimizing 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.

> 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.

Minecraft circuits can't have feedback? That's pretty sad:(

Amazing project!!