Minecraft HDL, an HDL for Redstone
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
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)
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
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
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!
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.
I’ve been looking for any reason to relearn Verilog and this might give me my first idea.
Such a cool idea. Thank you.
Amazing project!!
Minecraft circuits can't have feedback? That's pretty sad:(
[dead]
> 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.
[dead]
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.