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Running a Minecraft Server and More on a 1960s Univac Computer

102 points

by brilee

3 days ago

| past

| 8 comments

| farlow.dev

| HN

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proxysna

3 hours ago

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What a great write up, and a video too! Even though Minecraft stuff ofc was a bit of a bait, it would be interesting see the answer to "Can it run Doom?".

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zimpenfish

3 hours ago

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> a bit of a bait

"a bit" is doing a lot of work there. It was absolute nonsense. They were no closer to running a Minecraft server than I am to running UKGOV.

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voidUpdate

3 hours ago

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They hosted a program that allowed minecraft clients to connect... I'd class that as a minecraft server, even if it wasn't a very good one

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zimpenfish

17 minutes ago

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> They hosted a program that allowed minecraft clients to connect...

Connect in the sense of receiving a login packet and saying "yes". That's it. Steps 1, 2, 3, 9, 10 of [0] (they didn't mention encryption or compression, I'm assuming they didn't implement it.)

They didn't mention anything about any of the steps past 10 - again, assuming they didn't implement them.

It's a trivial thing they've implemented - good work, sure, but a Minecraft server? Absolutely not.

[0] https://minecraft.wiki/w/Java_Edition_protocol/FAQ#What's_th...?

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proxysna

3 hours ago

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Yeah, my thought exactly, execution lacked, but i do admire the attempt.

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voidUpdate

3 hours ago

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It could probably run the code for doom, once recompiled for the risc-v emulator, but given that the only output is a paper teletype, displaying it would be a problem

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toast0

2 hours ago

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> but given that the only output is a paper teletype, displaying it would be a problem

You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. A cacodaemon floats by, hissing.

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Cthulhu_

2 hours ago

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And given the NES emulator example, take half an hour per frame.

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petterroea

55 minutes ago

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Stupid question, would a quick&dirty LLVM backend for univac be possible to write, or are there inherent incompatibilities due to its weird architecture?

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mmastrac

29 minutes ago

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I'm not sure if LLVM would support ones-compliment (does GCC even support that any more?)

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kaladin-jasnah

4 hours ago

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Hah, I heard about this at VCF East this year, but didn't get to check out the exhibit. There was another MC server demo running on old Macs IIRC. Shame the event was cut short due to a bomb threat.

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Dwedit

2 hours ago

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"What's My Line" had in-show advertisements for the UNIVAC computer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEQlOrPs6fw

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caminanteblanco

3 hours ago

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mghackerlady

2 hours ago

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I watched the video when it came out, I've been a fan of his stuff for a while. It'd been a while since he uploaded and I was rewatching some of his videos the night before this was uploaded!

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vaughnegut

3 hours ago

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Favourite article I've read in a while, what a delight. I wonder what kind of performance you could get if someone hand wrote a dedicated, modern C compiler for it.

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voidUpdate

2 hours ago

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According to the article, it takes 40 univac instructions to run a single risc-v instruction, so potentially up to 40x the current performance. Though you'd probably need more instructions to do things than a single one, so probably less than that, say 10-20x? Especially if you made a custom compiler that made the best use of the hardware you could, since it's weird

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commandlinefan

20 minutes ago

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> it takes 40 univac instructions to run a single risc-v instruction

Which is wild, given:

> The computer’s original purpose was to be used by the Navy to read in radar signals and direct artillery

I'd really be fascinated to see how that was done on such a primitive machine, shame that's probably been lost.

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kls0e

1 hour ago

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beautiful, thank you