[Mod] Mesecons (= redstone) [GitHub] [minetest-mod-mesecons]

[nisaea]

Hello o/

What an absolute monster of a thread... so forgive me if it has already been discussed but the search feature is not very helpful.

I ran into a mesecon issue in Minetest Extended so I posted there, and was kindly informed of the existence of this thread.

Basically, I've had heaps of fun playing with this mod and one thing leading to another, I've built a clock and two registers. However, the clock just stops from time to time because its FPGA overheats. I've added an extra delayer to my clock to slow it down, but it's kind of a bummer I have to half the frequency.

Would it help if I used standalone logic gates instead of a FPGA or will I still have intermittent faceplants down the line?

Now, to share the fun, here's the faulty clock:



And the two registers:



Thanks in advance!

[Merak]

Would you direct me to a circuit design for the registers or latches?

[v-rob]

Essentially everything in Mesecons overheats at some point if it switches too much. The idea is that rouge circuits shouldn't be able to slow down a server, so they break at too high a speed. So, I would guess that a delayer or some other way to slow it down would be your only bet. Perhaps you could chain delayers in parallel in some way so that if one is delaying, another starts delaying in a tiered way to slow down the circuit, but not so much as a single delayer would. Alternatively, you could look in the code and change the amount of time the delayer delays.

[nisaea]

Would you direct me to a circuit design for the registers or latches?

Of course! But I don't have a document or anything, I just followed Ben Eater's explanations about his breadboard 8-bit computer. You can find the first video he made about register logic here, and his D flip-flop video here.

I use 3 FPGAs for each bit:
- One for the logic needed between the bus, the load signal and the flip-flop input and output
- One for the D flip-flop
- One for the "tri state transceiver" which is just an and gate in my case (we can't have 3 states anyway), but I still used an FPGA for space management reasons.

Also added pretty lights to see what's stored from afar:


Next step would be an adder, hopefully this isn't too hard to reproduce.

Essentially everything in Mesecons overheats at some point if it switches too much. The idea is that rouge circuits shouldn't be able to slow down a server, so they break at too high a speed. So, I would guess that a delayer or some other way to slow it down would be your only bet. Perhaps you could chain delayers in parallel in some way so that if one is delaying, another starts delaying in a tiered way to slow down the circuit, but not so much as a single delayer would. Alternatively, you could look in the code and change the amount of time the delayer delays.

I see, thanks a lot for the explanation and suggestions. I'm probably not going to touch the code, it's not that big a deal tbh. At least for now. xD

[DS-minetest]

@nisaea:
There are setting for configuring the cooldown:
mesecon.overheat_max (max allowed heat),
mesecon.cooldown_time (how long it takes to cool down from max heat to 0, in seconds) and
mesecon.cooldown_granularity (defines how often the cooldown step is done, don't set this too low)
If you set the latter two high/low enough, overheats will get very unlikely or impossible: devices can only get active once every step. how long one minetest step is, is also controlled by some setting

Anyways, you might still want to keep the overheating and add some delay.

Delayers aren't the only way of delaying. Gates always have a delay of exactly two steps. One can place multiple diode gates after another and the delay in steps is always the same. Delayers on the other hand are not exact in terms of steps, which can result in signals that are only one step long, such signals can result in fast blinking in some circuits.

Btw. there still much potential to build your memory smaller, even without fpgas. ;)

[nisaea]

Thanks a lot, that's very helpful info!

Btw. there still much potential to build your memory smaller, even without fpgas. ;)

Yeah, ik I'm probably not doign a very good job, but I'm very new to Minetest, and never played Minecraft or build a circuit irl so... even if it's not perfect I'm already pretty proud it works tbh x) (plus I'm playign on minetest extended so I don't have things like digilines or those lua thingies)

I'm just enjoying the learnign experience and trial and error process ^^ maybe I'll check out how other people did it later.

[Miniontoby]

Thanks a lot, that's very helpful info!

Btw. there still much potential to build your memory smaller, even without fpgas. ;)

Yeah, ik I'm probably not doign a very good job, but I'm very new to Minetest, and never played Minecraft or build a circuit irl so... even if it's not perfect I'm already pretty proud it works tbh x) (plus I'm playign on minetest extended so I don't have things like digilines or those lua thingies)

I'm just enjoying the learnign experience and trial and error process ^^ maybe I'll check out how other people did it later.

For more Ben eaters build check the Mesecons Computer Builds: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=24034
There are prebuild machines and downloads of them

[Minsc]

Old Phantasy Star Online player here.

I recalled the image of a Mese Crystal when suddenly the currency "Meseta" from PSO popped into my mind. Is there a conspiracy here? They look too similar.

[PolySaken]

Old Phantasy Star Online player here.

I recalled the image of a Mese Crystal when suddenly the currency "Meseta" from PSO popped into my mind. Is there a conspiracy here? They look too similar.

Mese in minetest_game is based on a finnish(?) programming joke so it's somewhat plausible that PSO devs extrapolated from that, but It being a yellow diamond is too much of a coincidence. Either it's pure chance, or someone wasn't truthful about where 'mese' came from lol.
I'm betting on pure chance since the world is huge and the combination of yellow gem + 'mese' isn't weird or esoteric, just unlikely.

[Minsc]

Old Phantasy Star Online player here.

I recalled the image of a Mese Crystal when suddenly the currency "Meseta" from PSO popped into my mind. Is there a conspiracy here? They look too similar.

Mese in minetest_game is based on a finnish(?) programming joke so it's somewhat plausible that PSO devs extrapolated from that, but It being a yellow diamond is too much of a coincidence. Either it's pure chance, or someone wasn't truthful about where 'mese' came from lol.
I'm betting on pure chance since the world is huge and the combination of yellow gem + 'mese' isn't weird or esoteric, just unlikely.

If I recall, Meseta originated in Phantasy Star for the Master System. I hardly played those classic RPG's so I don't know if the Meseta shape and colour originated there.

That double pyramid shape (what is the actual name?) of the crystal is common enough. Yellow is close enough to gold so I can see why they went with that colour. PS originated in Japan so Meseta does follow their language character structure. It may have been one of those cool coincidences. Or maybe one of the Japanese devs had a Finnish (?) dev friend. Perhaps the joke was even floating around the programming world back in the late 80's.

No matter really, just a fun thing to note. :)