Combinator Display - Need help with theory

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Xeteth
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Combinator Display - Need help with theory

Post by Xeteth »

So I am making a display which is going to give me a visual output on certain outposts within my world. The display cycles through different outposts from OreType 1-10 and gives me the number of trains currently running, total ore remaining under the patch and the mining rate/min for each outpost. I have already made some displays which can be seen here:
Displays
Now, whilst these work perfectly I am not really happy with them. Every single digit there has it's own number 'alphabet' controlling it - so when the value is 3 for example, a decider set to 'when signal = 3' will output data from a constant combinator which will contain the associated signals for that digit to be displayed on the display. This means that for each digit display there is 10 deciders and 10 constant combinators - again it works but I am sure there's a better way of doing it.

So, without much knowledge of computer science terminology essentially what I am trying to do is cut out each 'aphabet' on each digit display and make one major 'alphabet' which can process a number of values at the same time then display these on the associated displays (probably easiest to move the data to the displays using bitshift). This is what I need help doing if it is at all possible to do.

Here's a crude diagram of what I am wanting to achieve, hopefully it makes sense:
Crude Diagram
I have done something similar to this in the past where a single alphabet can process numerous values to display something. I did this by feeding the alphabet one value each tick and storing the output in different memory cells before bitshifting it all to a display once it had all been processed. I know I can do the same thing here to achieve the outcome I want, however that gets a bit tedious and messy and I am trying to keep the entity count down if possible. Can anyone think of a way in which I can manipulate the input values and run them through the alphabet all running in parallel?

Any help would be much appreciated!

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DaveMcW
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Re: Combinator Display - Need help with theory

Post by DaveMcW »

The circuit network has limited multiprocessing capability. We can use the "Each" signal to group together one set of inputs, but not two.

In your case, you have a group of alphabet signals (Set 1) and a group of input signals (Set 2). Only one of them can be run in parallel.

You want to use a single alphabet, which is totally possible. But now we have used up our parallel capacity on the alphabet, forcing us to process the inputs at 1 per tick. You already rejected 1 decoder that takes many ticks to do many inputs. The other solution is to build many decoders to do many inputs in 1 tick.

If your decoder is simple enough, many decoders is not a problem. See my latest digital display for a 1-combinator decoder.

If you have a large alphabet (60+ characters), a large input set (60+ inputs to display at once), and a small display size (20 pixels), it might make sense to decode single pixels. Build 20 decoders that each examine the input and attach a specific pixel if it matches their alphabet.

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