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?".
> a bit of a bait<p>"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.
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
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!
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.
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
Related:
<a href="https://github.com/TheScienceElf/UNIVAC-1219" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/TheScienceElf/UNIVAC-1219</a>
<a href="https://youtu.be/rU8sCbwB8XU" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/rU8sCbwB8XU</a>
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.