This Minecraft creation blots out the sun for the villagers below, they surely praise it as God, but we know it really to be a functioning 32-bit computer with 2 kB of RAM
Building a computer is one thing. Designing a computer from scratch is another. Doing both of those things in the confines of Microsoft's smash-hit sandbox game Minecraft is, I want to say, absurd? The folly of man? An affront to God? Yet here we are, and the Minecraft computer is nearly complete.
Ryan Boulds is a recent computer science graduate who began building this computer within Minecraft last year. I caught up with him last year to discuss the project, which was at the time just taking shape. Boulds told me then that he began the project 'for the fun of it', though was taken aback by the explosion of interest and excitement when he posted the unfinished computer to TikTok.
«My Minecraft Redstone computer is now in the final stages of construction!» Boulds proclaims in his latest video. In which, a mass of redstone circuits and blocks is displayed hovering over the world below like an alien spacecraft. The villagers surely must praise it as a God.
This computer is designed to be programmable and run Boulds' assembly code. It will be able to run a heap of important functions required of a processing unit—add, subtract, multiply, divide, modulo, bitshift left, bitshift right, rotate right, and rotate left. It has 16 32-bit registers and will be able to display converted numbers on a screen crafted out of blocks in much the same way as the rest.
Some of the first code to run on this computer? The Fibonacci Sequence—each number is the sum of the preceding two numbers.
The computer now includes 2 kB of RAM, which is enough to run basic programs but, sadly, as Boulds notes, not enough to run Doom.
«Currently, it can run machine code when entered line by line, but I hope one day I will be able to have it run everything pre-programmed automatically,» Boulds notes. Essentially this would mean a way to store and load programs, which was on Boulds' things to-do list last year, too. A lot else on that list has been already ticked off, including the system RAM.
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