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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?".
Anything for the thumbnail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> it takes 40 univac instructions to run a single risc-v instruction Which is wild, given: > The computer’s original purpose was to be used by the Navy to read in radar signals and direct artillery I'd really be fascinated to see how that was done on such a primitive machine, shame that's probably been lost.
So the Univac would receive input coordinates for each target and track those in memory each turn.
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.
"The UNIX system for the UNIVAC 1100 series was built as an integrated development environment for transactions that run directly on EXEC. Unlike most other implementations, therefore, it runs not directly on the hardware but as a collection of user-level activities under control of EXEC. These obtain services that would normally be provided by device drivers, and some process creation and management services from EXEC. Any configuration supplied by Sperry, including multiprocessor ones, can run the UNIX system."
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/other...
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?".
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
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?".
Only 40,960 words of memory. That’s only 90kb total memory to split between our code and the memory it needs at runtime.
Looking at a copy of Doom on the Internet Archive (https://ia800404.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/15...), DOOM.EXE is about 709k, and DOOM.WAD is about 11159k.
I think that's a pretty solid no.
Also it's a 250khz CPU. Not megahertz. Kilohertz. It's slower than the 1MHZ 8-bit home computers like the Apple ][ or c64.
"Running" Doom might be possible with some insane hack that offloads storage and/or processing to more modern hardware crammed into the UNIVAC case but given that this is one of two UNIVACs in the entire world, and the only one that actually runs, I don't think the museum is gonna let anyone cram a Raspberry Pi up in there.