Random Thoughts Thread

[Ziggy]

Yes. The CPU in general is mind boggling. When I read about classic CPUs, such as the Motorola 6800 or the 6502, designing them almost seems achievable. With a transistor count around 5000, as amazing as that really is, it still feels like you could possibly wrap your head around it. Like, if you had a large enough room, you could breadboard such a CPU. But modern CPUs have many billions of transistors. A number so large you really can't even appreciate it anymore. So many transistors, a mere mortal couldn't possibly unlock the mysteries of it.

[Anapan]

Read something a while back:
How would you explain widespread computer use present day to someone from the 1800's?

We can talk to sand now and tell it to do math.

[RCBH928]

its really mind boggling that a computer can calculate, and it doesn't take a day or a week to complete the task, its instantaneous .

Can you imagine how many man hours and how long it will take to calculate USA tax over 50 states, 300Million people, 30M small businesses and 2 million LLC all done manually with pen and paper...wow...

[Anapan]

Just remembered about this dis-integrated CPU:
https://monster6502.com/

[RCBH928]

did...did that guy build an electric board by hand that works as a cpu that can run color video games?

[MrPopo]

Video games won't work well on that due to the timing issues from being blown up like that. The physics of having the transistors that spread out (compared to being inside a chip) is a significant slow down to its ability to process instructions. Meanwhile all the other components in a computer are still designed for the original clock speed. While some applications might be able to handle that well, games are notoriously sensitive to timing.

[Anapan]

It would have to be tailor-made for the 15x slower clock speed, but yes, it would play a game in color. Like those old pocket-computers that are calculators and can execute basic programs very slowly, and those graphing calculators that can be hacked to execute assembler-compiled programs to play games well despite executing basic programs sluggishly. It would be a challenge well beyond those better-playing pac-man games made for the Atari-2600 which use this same CPU. I would expect the game made for it would perform on the level of those block-game keychain games, or play well, but only use a small portion of the screen like playing Wolfenstein 3-D in a tiny window in the middle. Not the goal, but I'd love to see what those LEDs display while playing this tailor-made game vs. it slowly executing a commercial game at 4fps.

[RCBH928]

MOnSter 6502 running a game.

[Anapan]

Thanks!

[RCBH928]

I am watching first season of Cheers. Its scary to think all those actors are +40 years now....
the show feels pretty modern.