Minecraft HDL, an HDL for Redstone

This is an amazing timeline. I still remember the day redstone was added to Minecraft. I spent the entire evening and many days afterwards on the forum brainstorming how to implement various things. I think I had one of the first if not the first T flip flop, it "took an entire room" and was slow. It has been crazy watching things get compacted, repeaters getting added, pistons, comparators. I remember when BUDs got discovered and then eventually just added as a block.

Now* we have an entire HDL.

I honestly stopped keeping track of things around 2012 so I am completely lost looking at modern redstone contraptions.

*8 years ago

This is a cool tool but compared to modern redstone contraptions this is a sidegrade, not an upgrade. It's straightforward torch and dust logic, with each torch being a nor gate and dust being wires. And it doesn't consider timing at all. This could have been made the week redstone was added (with minor adjustments to not have repeaters), and it wouldn't have taken any newer insights.

Ah, damn. I was envisioning something limited but not this limited.

I haven't looked at the code, but you could presumably extend it, or maybe expect further development on the logic?

->The repo says "Branch out from master and have fun!"

I loved redstone. At some point it got forked and the fork was named "redpower" if I remember correctly. Good stuff.

There were other great mods (I forgot the name, something that has to do with turtles?) and I remember implementing a shell in Lua, among other things.

Red Power was (is... Kind of) an extension not a fork. Although you could call it more an reinterpretation.

But really RP vs Redstone is more like C vs Assembly. I've seen crazy things done in both but I think I find it a bit more impressive when people use pure Redstone to get things done. There are so many dimensions where you both need to understand the mechanics and where there are opportunities for optimization.

The turtle mod you are talking about is ComputerCraft.

Yes, ComputerCraft! I have written so much Lua because of it. Only if I still had the scripts. :(

I had no idea RedPower is not a fork, I just remember having switched to it because of no updates for Redstone or version incompatibility issues or something? It's been a really long time ago.

Redstone isn't a mod. It was added to Minecraft in a secret Friday update in the early days around alpha iirc.

Oh hold on. I was confusing Redstone with https://ftb.fandom.com/wiki/RedPower_2 and Project Red[1] that came afterwards. How embarassing. :P So it was RedPower -> RedPower 2, and then Project Red. It added a lot of goodies! You should check out the links.

[1] https://ftbwiki.org/Project_Red

For what it's for, it's better that it's simple.