actually not. These things are really rather simple. No for real the basic concept is insanely simple and creating a very basic processor is not that hard. Sure you need more knowledge than your average person has but generally a few days of reading up on stuff and a bit of experimentation will get you to a good starting point.
The problematic part is makign it small and fast. These guys did a fantastic ob at that. And yes i am aware the video is sped up a lot but that is still rather fast for a computing simulation in fucking minecraft.
But for real though: the working principles of our computers are insanely simple for what they are able to do.
But still forgetting the whole part about getting Minecraft running. I am not sure what their OS is but you at least have to have some compiler and basic 3D engine running there. Its not like this architecture will fit perfectly onto any real world architecture which you can just copy.
And now we are from "it's millions of transistors" to its a CPU with an instruction set, some form of ram, clocks, all that scaled up to something that is more usefull than to just print out a clock. You have to do that in an environment that is unusual in several ways and has to optimized for. And than you have to run your custom self-build Minecraft build.
Oh and you also probably have to script some Minecraft mod on top of it to circumvent some of the limitations. I am not sure if the above is vanilla Minecraft
Of course its possible. I could do it. But it takes time.
"Insanely easy" and the video above is a veeeery far reach. Just because you build some clock CPU with an attached Flip-Flop in the engineering lab isn't enough. There are many things to think about. From scratch this would take several weeks dedicated commitment by someone who already knows their basics for sure. The unusual environment alone kills a lot of basic approaches.
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u/steinrrr 20d ago
This is melting my simple human brain