Mojang's sandbox game Minecraft is one of the most popular games in the world, partly because of how wonderfully accommodating it is to players. The game has become well known for allowing players to build just about anything inside its sandbox. Now, one Minecraft player is pushing that to the limit by creating an entire 8-bit processor that can run its own games entirely within Minecraft.
Minecraft players have created a wide variety of structures and devices in the game over the years, including a full recreation of Skyrim's College of Winterhold. However, YouTuber sammyuri has built something on an entirely different scale.
Sammyuri has reportedly spent seven months constructing an enormous--and enormously complicated--computer processor that exists virtually within the Minecraft engine. Although another Minecraft mod allows players to run the Mario 64 engine within Minecraft, sammyuri's creation, called the Chungus 2, exists on an entirely different scale. The Chungus 2, which is short for Computation Humongous Unconventional Number and Graphics Unit 2, may be the single largest and most complex processor built in Minecraft as of writing.
In a five-minute-long video dedicated to showing off their creation, sammyuri explains that the Chungus 2 simulates an 8-bit processor featuring a one hertz clock speed and 256 bytes of RAM. The processor uses Minecraft's existing physics engine to recreate the structure of an actual processor, but on a much larger scale and featuring materials like redstone dust, torches, repeaters, pistons, and levers. Each of the Minecraft blocks making up the processor is about a meter long. This means that if the Chungus 2 was built in real life, it would be a computer processor the size of a skyscraper or cruise ship.
The video shows the Chungus 2 being connected to an in-game 32×32 “screen” and “controller” that can be manipulated by having a Minecraft player jump onto block-sized buttons. In this manner, the Chungus 2 can be used to play a number of simple 2D games like Tetris, Snake, and even simulate a graphing calculator. This isn't the first time Tetris has been made playable in Minecraft, but it may be one of the most memorable. Sammyuri admitted in a pinned comment under the video that all of the programs they filmed themselves playing on the Chungus 2 were sped up by a factor between a few hundred to a few thousand times to make them playable in real time. However, given that each program was also built virtually in Minecraft using a cartridge about the size of a freight train, fans may be inclined to forgive them.
Minecraft is available now for Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
Source: PC World