PC Compact Hard Drive

Programmatic

Steampunker
This hard drive is a slightly modified version of the one I presented in the "Let's Make Some Hard Drives" thread (https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/lets-make-some-hard-drives.43916/page-2#post-1056562). The main difference is that this one uses a new design for the read/write mechanism and has a slightly more compact multiplexer.

The entire hard drive can store up to 64 kilobytes (65,536 bytes) of data. It stores 16 times as much data as my RAM chip, while being only about 5 times the size, making it far more compact. The disadvantage of the hard drive is that, unlike the RAM chip, which allows you to access any byte at any time, the data in the hard drive must be read in the same order that it is written. This is because the hard drive stores data in a series of faulty lamp gates linked together via a rotating bit shifter. By triggering the bit shifter, you can cycle through the data and access each byte one by one.

In this video, I show the hard drive in action and how it is separated into 256 "blocks" containing 256 bytes each. These blocks can be accessed separately, essentially functioning as independent, smaller hard drives:


Finally, here is a closeup of a small section of one block:

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And here is a single column containing 16 blocks. The full hard drive contains 16 of these columns:

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Cool. Are you going to be able to fit the whole computer in a single map? Or can you only fit 1 part per map? XD

There are so many kinds of things I want to try making, but my computer IRL sucks to much to run Terraria. You should see if you can make a compact LCD screen using wire bulbs. It's something I have always wanted to try and do since they were added to the game.
 
Cool. Are you going to be able to fit the whole computer in a single map? Or can you only fit 1 part per map? XD

There are so many kinds of things I want to try making, but my computer IRL sucks to much to run Terraria. You should see if you can make a compact LCD screen using wire bulbs. It's something I have always wanted to try and do since they were added to the game.

The RAM and hard drive together take up less than a third of a large world, and since they'll almost certainly be the the computer's two largest components by far, the rest of it should fit easily. As for an LCD screen with wire bulbs, I don't think it would be possible to make one that is sufficiently compact, since wire bulbs don't behave in the same way that pixel boxes do. Also, like the pixel box, the wire bulb always appears white on the minimap, regardless of its active colors, making it useless for minimap displays as well.
 
Yeah, I was joking about the size. But it is still pretty big. And Pixel Boxes are not yet obtainable in the game. Only way to get them is to cheat them in. XD. Maybe in the next wire update we will get the things needed to make a compact LCD screen.
 
That is... very compact compared to the one posted in "lets make some hard drives". I wish I had time to learn how this works but college is killing me and I doubt I'd have time. This sort of hard drive you're doing I'm not familiar with haha. I am familiar with this sort:
Here's the memory device that I'm using for my calculator:

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If you ignore the extra 3 bits at the right, then what you have is a RAM chip that can store up to 16 16-bit numbers, though the device can easily be tiled to increase the storage size. Also, by replacing the vertical bit shifter on the left with a binary multiplexer, you can select a memory location using another binary integer.

But I'm not familiar with this multiplexing thing you're doing haha :p It looks really cool though!
 
That is... very compact compared to the one posted in "lets make some hard drives". I wish I had time to learn how this works but college is killing me and I doubt I'd have time. This sort of hard drive you're doing I'm not familiar with haha. I am familiar with this sort:


But I'm not familiar with this multiplexing thing you're doing haha :p It looks really cool though!

Well the device you were familiar with was actually my old design for a RAM chip, not a hard drive. Still, the RAM chip I'm using now is also far more compact than that.
 
Well the device you were familiar with was actually my old design for a RAM chip, not a hard drive. Still, the RAM chip I'm using now is also far more compact than that.
shows what i know :p I don't know too too much about the inner workings of hardware. I'd like to though. Lately I've been busy learning software development. Similar, to an extent, but nothing like that. No idea how you got the compact RAM or hard drive to work but its really cool.
 
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