Computerraria: A fully compliant RISC-V computer inside Terraria | Hacker News Reader

Computerraria: A fully compliant RISC-V computer inside Terraria

github.com

289 pointsinickt41 comments

Hey I'm the one who made this, if anyone is interested in the specifics I'm happy to go into details!

Also as another comment indicates probably a better explanation of the project is the video I made about it: https://youtu.be/zXPiqk0-zDY

This is a super impressive achievement.

- What would you say is your biggest learning from this experiment? - What were the Aha! moments you experienced while learning like this? For example, something you vaguely understood before but is now super clear to you.

I would say the RISC-V immediate encodings were like that, on first look they seemed completely random but as soon as I started implementing the decoder I realized they were geniusly crafted to make my life as easy as possible.

With your future prospects, where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Writing advanced Excel macros to power PowerPoint presentations.

Duh.

Dual PhDs from Tom7 and James Mickens.

With a bit of luck he could get an internship on an SRE team supporting ads data pipelines at Google.

Staring at a screen for 40+ hours a week realizing everything digital is essentially worthless. I'm sure he'll make good money though.

> worthless

> money

There appears to be some fundamental misunderstanding here.

Not really, unless you're a complete dunce. Money can be obtained in various ways that don't require soul sucking work of letting your life slip away in computer chair staring at screens. Anyone with a decently average emotional IQ knows this.

How much time you spent on this project?

https://youtu.be/zXPiqk0-zDY?t=10

600hrs over 5 months.

I love it! Impressive use of 4 metal layers!

A friend sent me the YouTube video, which is a fantastic watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXPiqk0-zDY.

Minecraft computers have been done for a while now, but seeing a full RISC-V computer running programs is really impressive, and frankly just seems really cool. The programs are written in Rust, and then compiled to run in game. Plus, the author needed to write their own mod to make the Terraria wiring efficient enough to support the computer: https://github.com/misprit7/WireHead

I cannot believe he did the wiring "by hand". Loved the bug example he highlighted, which I hope is something he can reference later in life, "What's the most difficult bug you ever fixed?"

Even with the "cross-eyed" trick to overlap the left and right sides, I could not spot the error. How in the world did he find it!?

I lost it when he dropped the containerized CI pipeline! Shows he was thinking about the whole process, not just the (literally) fiddly bits. Incredibly broad set of skills the author demonstrated.

Holy shit! Game, optimizations, code, test suite and even a simple 3D render - not to mention a well edited video game with a great sense of humor, gags, memes and the obvious next step already in the works.

This guy is going places!!

Play https://nandgame.com/ if you're interested in those kinds of things.

Now we need a terraria build for RISC, so we can play terraria in terraria

You might want to watch the video the author himself posted above!

Why?

He's already working on it

Tbh, the video was better explained than my college computer architecture lessons

Fully compliant to RISC-V how? Is it conforming to a specific RVI profile? The project states "By emulating a complete rv32i instruction set inside the wiring system of Terraria, we push back speeds to the early 70s era, tossing the ball firmly back into the court of silicon engineer without losing any software functionality."

So this is building a RISC-V *microcontroller* but what version of the ISA? 2.2 from 2017? Is it sucessfully passing conformance tests (https://github.com/riscv-software-src/riscv-tests)? I don't want to dunk on the project, but the title is over-selling and not scoping the context of the work. I look forward to some more updates from @misprit7!

Note: I'm the working group lead for distro-integration within the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) group.

If you watch the video or check the github repo, (and you really should watch the video, it's fantastic), you'll see he has a full conformance test run in-game as part of a custom built CI/CD pipeline. In Terraria. I really enjoyed writing that.

I'm the one who made this. It's rv32i, and yes the 2017 specs. It passes every rv32i test in the repository you sent, see the test/ folder for the riscof plugin I wrote. I also have CI in a docker to headlessly run Terraria and programmatically run all these tests whenever the world changes on the main branch.

I'm not throwing around fully compliant lightly here!

It seems I have underestimated Terraria as a sandbox game.

Roger me sidewise, this is wonderfully crazy. I foresee a bright future for the creator.

Very impressive and in such a short time frame. So is the schema for this design only in the game? I assume if the game is saved it can be loaded on another computer? But can the schema/layout be emitted to a file so it can be parsed elsewhere?

Hmm I wonder if they ever fixed Terraria for Mac OS. I bought it based on hype but it wasn't handling my laptop display right so I never found out what it's about.

Haven't had any problem playing on Steam for Mac OS once you get your resolution settings correct.

Just tried and mouse's still confined to less than full screen at 1280x800.

I think it was worse 5 years ago. Will try again in 5 years.

I don't get this bug playing fullscreen at 1440p on M1 macOS... maybe play around with the settings a bit?

I am paraphrasing others here, but its supposed to be a 2D minecraft game

Cross-compile an emulator to RISC-V, then the false vacuum decays and cats and dogs live together.

I mean there's Minecraft-in-Minecraft, not quite the same but... getting very meta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BP7DhHTU-I