12-31-2013, 03:45 PM
I had previously done some minor work with item memory but I couldn't come up with anything that could be considered useful. After seeing that Chibill was planning on making one I decided to revisit the topic. This is what I came up with.
The coloured wool is for selecting what address to read from. The input and ouput are to the right. The actual memory is to the left and the two clocks that control item flow are in the bottom left.
The memory works by storing wool in double chests which are connected to droppers. The droppers are selectable and ouputs the wool into channels of water. These channels bring the wool to a sorting station and each colour is then counted. The wool is returned to the supply chests and new wool is ouputed to refill the memory chest.
The memory is VERY slow, but considering it is 256 bytes it's fairly compact. This would not be suitable for RAM memory but rather for something like a HDD. Instead of reading a single byte at a time it could read out the entire contents of a chest allowing RAM-like access to the contents of that specific chest. Once you've read and written what data you want you would rewrite the contents of the chest.
This memory is very easily expandable and re-modeled to fit ones specific purposes. Each individual memory cell has room for 18 bytes (18.25 to be exact). The bulk of the device is the read/write control which does not change much at all even if more memory cells are added (the only thing that needs changing is the addressing). This allows for easy expansion without growing the device all too much.
Here are some more pictures:
The device seen from the side. Some memory cells are visible.
The water canal system for writing.
The supply chests.
The input and output. (Thanks to IceGlade for making the input device!
)
The coloured wool is for selecting what address to read from. The input and ouput are to the right. The actual memory is to the left and the two clocks that control item flow are in the bottom left.
The memory works by storing wool in double chests which are connected to droppers. The droppers are selectable and ouputs the wool into channels of water. These channels bring the wool to a sorting station and each colour is then counted. The wool is returned to the supply chests and new wool is ouputed to refill the memory chest.
The memory is VERY slow, but considering it is 256 bytes it's fairly compact. This would not be suitable for RAM memory but rather for something like a HDD. Instead of reading a single byte at a time it could read out the entire contents of a chest allowing RAM-like access to the contents of that specific chest. Once you've read and written what data you want you would rewrite the contents of the chest.
This memory is very easily expandable and re-modeled to fit ones specific purposes. Each individual memory cell has room for 18 bytes (18.25 to be exact). The bulk of the device is the read/write control which does not change much at all even if more memory cells are added (the only thing that needs changing is the addressing). This allows for easy expansion without growing the device all too much.
Here are some more pictures:
The device seen from the side. Some memory cells are visible.
The water canal system for writing.
The supply chests.
The input and output. (Thanks to IceGlade for making the input device!
)
