Technology @lemmy.world Lee Duna @lemmy.nz 9 mo. ago

Functional 16-bit CPU built and runs in Excel, 3Hz processor includes 128KB of RAM, 16-color display, and a custom assembly language

www.tomshardware.com Functional 16-bit CPU built and runs in Excel, 3Hz processor includes 128KB of RAM, 16-color display, and a custom assembly language

Inkbox on YouTube asks, "Remember when I said my sanity stood in the way?" before detailing his Excel-ASM16 language

Functional 16-bit CPU built and runs in Excel, 3Hz processor includes 128KB of RAM, 16-color display, and a custom assembly language

57 comments

we're all going a little crazy, but this is just the right kind of insane. make it run pong with powerpoint controls next please.
- pfft— 16-bit @ 3Hz and 128k of ram?
  
  give me Adventure! waiting for each turn to process and refresh would actually give a sense of suspense!
  
  edit: for reference, Pong on an Atari 2600 ran at 8-bit @ 1.19 MHz w/128b of ram. so 3Hz is barely enough power to process rudimentary logic and text display. Adventure was node-based with a simple language-prompt interpreter. it would be slooooow, but it would have a chance of actually working.
  
  edit 2: Adventure, (aka ADVENT) was the original text-adventure game:
  
  This is one that you can really get your teeth into. You travel around an imaginary world, collecting treasure and solving puzzles, all the while making a map on paper so that you have an idea where you are. The control system is fairly simple with just one or two word commands, and once you get the hang of this, it works really well. It is also made easier by certain short-cuts such as just typing, 'building' to enter the building.
  
  The game ADVENT, which adventure is based on, was written on a PDP-10 in FORTRAN by Will Crowther in 1976 and is considered to be the first adventure game. The following year Don Woods expanded the game by adding fantasy elements and making it more puzzle-orientated.
  
  Originally written by James Gillogly in 1977 as a port of the classic FORTRAN game ADVENT written by Will Crowther and Don Woods.
  
  (source)
  
  I actually got to play the original version when I was a student at RIT in the 90s, as the College of Computer Science still had a DEC PDP-10 running a VMS/VAX system that had a copy of Adventure. It was infuriating, and I wasted far too many hours in study hall playing that shit when I should have been learning C++.
  
  Mild correction, 128 bytes of ram, not kilo bytes. Yeah, that thing was somewhat limited.
EVERYONE IS SO MUCH BETTER AT COMPUTERS THAN MEEEEEEEE
- Everyone? You sure? Just off the top of my head, I've witnessed:
  
  A fellow millennial recently calling his tower "the modem".
  
  A user who thinks a computer experiencing a "crash", as in the unexpected termination of a process, means everything on the hard drive was just lost.
  
  A teacher who swears their fiber optic internet connection always slows down when it rains.
  
  A family member who thinks cell phones are actually miraculous.
  
  An IT director who decided to save time while rewiring an entire school district's network by forgoing patch panels completely, terminating hundreds of CAT-6 cables (which he first laid directly on top of the drop ceiling grid) with RJ45 connectors plugged straight into switches, labeling each with masking tape.
  
  A police officer who called his chief and supervisor over to his desk in order to explain that he discovered a massive vulnerability on the agency website, demonstrating the risk by showing them how he was able to change some text with the browser's element inspector.
  
  A software developer who only used Internet Explorer (years ago when Chrome was still arguably the best option) because "Google tracks you". He was later sentenced to decades in federal prison for organizing the production of CSAM on the surface web, not the darknet, mostly over Craigslist.
  
  To be fair to 4, cell phones are miraculous.
  
  3 is possible if the physical run to your home is in bad shape. I've known two people who had weather dependant internet due to that.
  
  6 got me LMAO
  
  that doesn't make my unencrypted jellyfin server look so bad.
  
  The last one bugs me. I keep my mouth shut about my issues with tracking because I fucking hate being a product for corpos, but because child predators avoid it as well, I get looked at like a perv for doing that. Apparently good people do their utmost to remove their privacy in order to avoid such appearances.
  
  I've been that, only it was "processor", not "modem".
  
  I've met a guy of the "Windows reinstaller" kind, who thought that you can reformat a hard drive if it has SMART warnings and they'll go away.
  
  This may not be entirely false, if it rains in a wider area. Say, lots of people use the same infrastructure via wireless connections, and when it rains, their have packets dropped more often etc, sometimes connections interrupted because of this, then even on L3 there's more actual traffic because of resending packets, even on application level trying to do something many times instead of doing it once. So in the end there's more load on the same infrastructure, and the connection may be slower even for people connected via fiber. I'm not a network admin so this may look clumsy.
  
  Well, life is less interesting for them than it could be.
  
  Seen too much of similar things.
  
  I've been that.
  
  Actual criminals think differently from us, and I'd say there's an element of evolution to this, so they are likely right and we are likely wrong.
  
  Number 4 is kind of correct, but I suspect the family member means it in a magical kind of miraculous?
- I know how to navigate a Windows file system and my 13-year-old daughter doesn't. So I can still feel superior to someone!
so its technically possible to run excel with excel
This is right up there with portal on the n64
- Sadly, Portal64 has come to an end after cease & desist letters were issued to James. Still, it was a fantastic series and he is a great presenter, he makes the technical challenges he faces so Interesting to follow.
  
  Source? All I see is that Valve kindly asked him to take down the project before Nintendo comes after them for using Nintendo's proprietary libraries, but the project could hypothetically continue if he switched to an open source library instead.
  
  It really sucks and i wish i had cloned the repo. To me the code was so clean and easily readable, i wanted to look over it more to learn for my own n64 project.
But can Excel run Doom?
- Actually there is a russian guy who made that happen. Youtube it.
- Not with 128KB RAM. Possible with asset tweaking though.
  
  The 3hz frequency might even be a bigger problem
  
  Look up "blood shoot" 1994 sega megadrive game, first person shooter with split screen support on that hardware, i think this emulator could do it too in theory
this irrationally infuriates me. (edit: because I hate excel)

cool work, tho
- Why would anyone hate Excel?
  
  Numbers scary
  
  Also, and
Can it run doom?
- Doesn't meet the minimum requirements :P
  
  That's never stopped us before.
- the article anticipates and responds to that question
  
  You expect me to actually read the article like some kind of schlub?
- But can it run crysis?
- at 3hz it would be a really long game
heard you like cpus so imma gonna put a cpu in your cpu dog
It runs DOOM?
- What doesn't run Doom? They have probably gotten cashew nuts to run Doom.
  
  Everything is doomed to run DOOM.
- If you enjoy watching 1 frame per x time period sequences, and you're okay with x being decades, it might "run" doom.
  
  3hz processing is probably achievable by some humans
- They say it can't run DOOM however you can use it to display the video output from DOOM.
Does that make Excel the operating system? Or is it the firmware/BIOS
- Excel would be emulating the silicon here
- Excel would be closest to a virtual machine software in this case
But does it run Crysis?

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