Hello Everyone

[spee2k12]

I just wanted to post to introduce my self to the forum,

I have been into computing on an IT and system builder level for about 16 years. Now I have decided to my self that this level of understanding just isnt enough and I have decided I wish to start studying computer science and programming from the ground up!  Amazingly I came across your fantastic book, like a few other people on this forum, by watching videos on you tube of a game I play called Minecraft.

I bought the book and I have to say I totally understand what you mean about professionals in the field not quite understanding what is really going on inside the computer.  I have also felt this way ever since I first came into contact with computers at school I always thought they arent teaching us properly.

Now I am plowing through your book avidly, and also developing the chips in a modified version of Minecraft that has been adapted for CS purposes!  I have a you tube channel I can post the link to later.  It only has one video of primative chips, in non Modded MC, and my early 8way 16bit multiplexor.

I already know a fair bit about programming, but my intention is to develop my knowledge to such a level that I can start writting full applications for Multiple platforms.

Its deffinately early days though, and any help as I undertake my studies would be greatly appreciated although I will try not to ask too many questions.

Thankyou for the briliant book and this forum.

[spee2k12]

*UPDATE*

After building all the chips in chapters 1 and 2 using Minecraft and some of its relavent logic mods including an ALU with Carry Look Ahead and the chips up to and including the RAM8 in Chapter 3, I have realised that recursivley building 16K of RAM by copying RAM8 using the hierarchy of other RAM chips listed in the book, even in the Minecraft editing package, will take many hundreds of hours of computer rendering.  

Added to that when clocking all 16K of RAM the host system will have to process the signals of 1000's of gates which will cause massive framerate lag in Minecraft.  This it looks like is the conclusion other people using MC to build computers have come to and I believe someone has only just completed a system capable of playing a game which seems to be more primitive than Tetris.  Even still this is an amazing feat!

I am very happy with my own efforts in MC, I believe it has given me some good knowledge of how these chips work,  I have also (out of necessity) built a master-slave driven DFF based on the RS latch in one of the MC mods, which I use in the RAMn chip, but now MC is becomming more of a hinderance to the learning process than anything (the only probability for a feasible to build and high performance MC HACK based 16K computer, as per this book, would be another MC mod that allows the implementation of blocks containing the various RAMn chips in code skipping the need to simulate all the gates individually, just like the hardware simulator does!)

Therefore, I have decided to move directly from RAM8 on MC in chapter 3 to implementing the other RAM chips and the rest of the system in the hardware simulator, using the same principle of utilising the built in chips from the last chapter as the book discusses.

Thankyou for reading!  Any help along the way will be much appreciated.