The description of the problem is in the Youtube video. I was trying to listen to a song at SoundCloud (or, perhaps more likely, a malicious site that imitates SoundCloud; I did not check the URL too closely), and as soon as I hit the "Play" button, my laptop's screen entered a "dead pixel test pattern" where it flashes white, black, red, green, blue in succession. It now does this constantly, even at bootup - sometimes you'll get lucky and see the startup screen, but more often it starts that test pattern from the very moment you power on the machine. Additionally, it is very clearly doing something behind that pattern - one time when I was able to log in to Windows before the test pattern started, I noticed that a) Dropbox had been disabled, and b) the machine was uploading a huge amount of data - 1GB in the perhaps five minutes I was able to use the machine. (Naturally, once I saw that upload happening, I disconnected from the network. Unfortunately I did not have a chance to find out where it was sending data and/or what data was being sent before the test pattern activated again).
Is this a known malware, or something new? Has this happened to anyone else; does anyone know anything about it?
Neat! I'll check it out tonight. HW division and mod are going to be difficult-ish: I was thinking that either I could use a DSP block or, failing that, bump up the clock frequency of the LUTs used for div/mod until the 16div16 operation can appear to occur in 3 main CPU cycles. I'd love to contribute whatever I can to the project - I mostly work with Lattice stuff but I guess it couldn't hurt to give Xilinx's tools a try^^ Thanks!
There's been no "official" memory map released (I don't know if Notch has even thought that out yet), but people on the forums are working on that. There will be various peripheral controllers, add-ons, etc., and as time goes on a "standard deployment" of the computer system (not just the CPU) will likely fall into place.
tl;dr: It doesn't break compatibility 'cos there's no compatibility to be broken yet ^^
There's also been an instruction set/specification released for it (http://www.0x10c.com/doc/dcpu-16.txt). And while yes, within the game the DCPU's main function is to run the ship, you'll note that Notch makes reference to playing games "while you're waiting for X to finish" any number of times. People are already getting interested in the possibility, and it seemed like a fun project for me. More than anything, I was curious whether anyone else was thinking along these lines.
I would want to have it cost much less than an Arduino in a "DIP package." The basic logic can be implemented in a $10 FPGA, add on cost of boards and connectors and a voltage regulator and it should still be less than $20. The advantage here would be that the user would be completely free to create her own "computer mainboard" with whatever peripherals she chooses. I might also consider doing an all-in-one with common peripherals, and if I did, a CDC/UART type thing would be high on the list. HDMI is easy to implement in recent FPGAs (easier than composite/S-Video/RGB out) which is why I'd want to display video using HDMI.
Is this a known malware, or something new? Has this happened to anyone else; does anyone know anything about it?
Thanks in advance, HN.