How I made Connect Four with GHASTS (and redstone)

Hey everyone a few months ago I designed this thing I like to call it the ghast pixel and what makes it super special is that it can show three colors being black white and as you can see in a moment striped and that’s a lot different from most Redstone pixel

Displays because they usually use Redstone lamps which only have two states being on and off it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that I even built this thing because we do love our wacky displays on this channel as shown here and here however one thing

Can be said for certain about this display and it’s probably just about the worst display I’ve ever designed in my life it’s heavy it’s clunky and it’s absolutely way too big to be used for any display of reasonable resolution despite these fallbacks many of my fans

Still had hope for the design and one of the ideas that was suggested fairly frequently was Connect Four and the reason this idea is so brilliant is because it basically fits my criteria perfectly it can be played on a very low resolution screen pretty much a six by

Seven it can be played using Giant pixels and also conveniently needs exactly three different pixel types an empty slot a player one slot and a player 2 slot and after about four months of waiting I finally worked up the nerve to put something together and I say worked up the nerve because the

First two times I tried anything Connect Four related I had to discontinue the project because it was either impossible or I was just way too incompetent to actually make something worthwhile okay so let’s actually address how this thing works but I’m not going to be talking

About this one because it’s a hunk of garbage we’re going to instead be addressing the more modern Design This is far more compact first thing you’ll notice the minecart it’s supposed to have a gas in it but I killed it because it’s impossible to see when it’s there

Next thing is this Minecart is fully pressed up against the red block here what that means is that when the gas is inside it’s actually fully poking out through both layers of walls this creates a full white pixel if we go ahead and Trigger the contraption

It inches backwards this is caused by a brief powering of the powered rail underneath what essentially this means now is that since it’s slightly backwards it’s slightly more set into the wall which means that we can only see the gas through these uh I guess the inner layer

Of these walls because it’s a ridged surface it allows us to create two layers of depth this is a striped pixel I’ll refer to it as a gray pixel from now on lastly we kind of got black this is caused by simply just moving it one more step inwards and that completely

Conceals the pixel in order to return back to the original state of white we bring this white block forward and that’s going to push the minecart back to the original state when we then again briefly power the powered rail the reason why this old design is such a

Piece of garbage and the new one isn’t is because this one takes a whole extra Minecart just to push this one back into place I don’t know what was going through my head when I designed this thing but this other Minecart makes this design so uncompact that it’s literally

Impossible to use in the final grid behind me okay so I’ve talked enough about the actual pixel how the hell do we make a Connect Four cell and logically it only needs to do five things the first thing is switch to Black this is when we inevitably reset

The board and we need to wipe the Slate clean the other one is the switch to gray that means when we drop a player 2 coin in it’s going to switch to the striped version of the pixel as seen over there and the other one is switch to White Player 1 pixel

The next thing I need to do is lock itself because if it didn’t it would just immediately be replaced by another pixel on top which is not what happens in Connect 4 and Connect 4 they stack on top of each other forming columns lastly it needs to unlock the pixel above

How the system is going to work is that all pixels above the bottom one will be locked and the moment that this one is failed it’ll unlock the next one then that one will be filled unlocking the next one and eventually it’ll pile up into a column very similar to how

Connect4 operates in game if we take a look at the guts of the contraption we can actually see that this white quartz block right here indicates whether or not this row is unlocked currently it’s in the unlocked position this makes sense the game hasn’t started yet and

The bottom row should be unlocked to receive coins if it’s below down here like all the other layers it’s going to be locked if we go ahead to the trigger system and we actually drop a coin you can see that this now changes the locked position we’ve dropped a coin

Into the first row and it actually sends a signal up through this rail Redstone here and puts the next layer into the unlocked position now it too can receive a coin and continue stacking upwards unfortunately when I initially designed this thing I made a stupid mistake see

The thing is is that this design is actually a tech demo the pixel was never meant to do anything real thus it was totally okay that they could only go from black to white to Gray and then back to black again this is actually a major issue though

When I actually teach you to play Connect 4. what essentially needs to happen is this black pixel an empty slot needs to be able to transition to both possible player inputs which means this Arrow needs to be turned around that breaks the machine this is impossible the fix I designed is that we

Actually just get rid of this Arrow it’s totally useless we actually just go straight from black to white and then to gray if we want a gray pixel we have to go through white regardless because it’s the only way the Machine Works a nice convenience though that popped up is

That it actually doesn’t matter whether you’re on a gray pixel or a white pixel it’s still possible to transition directly to Black making resetting the board incredibly easy if we actually look at the guts of this machine we can see that this white wire actually runs straight to the white power switch while

The gray wire actually hits this block which Powers both the white power switch and the gray power switch on this side with after a little bit of delay the reset switch is just this final wall right here and that just tells the machine to shove the minecart to the

Back of the display and switch it to Black alright so we’ve discussed what makes the columns work now let’s talk about some of the logic on top the turn indicator this thing just switches from Gray to White every single time we want to play a move

What also switch is when a turn is played is this block back and forth what essentially determines is whether or not a placement in this column will be a white or a gray every time we play a turn this switches which creates the turn-based play style of Connect Four

You don’t have to worry at all about this logic circuit on the back here this just makes sure that some Hooligans don’t spam the levers and break the machine instantly idiot proofing is the number one job of any engineer alright so on to actually playing the game you

Play the game with these buttons If that wasn’t self-explanatory enough but what’s great though is you might notice that that is actually really really fast if you play video games you know how miserable ping and latency can be and I actually sought to reduce this problem

By using instant wires for as much of the build as possible so when you put an input in it actually communicates to the machine relatively quickly the movie that you’re going to play as for the reset button it’s right behind here what that does is it just wipes the

Board and switches the turn to player one there’s actually one tidbit I forgot to mention or put into the machine and that’s the fact that you can continue to put coins into an already full column this I know is game breaking and totally wreck’s end game strategy but the reason

I’m leaving it in is because I’m lazy if you want to play fair you can play fair I’d like to imagine this mechanic is actually just a real-life analog to taking the coin and throwing it at the other person because it’s rude unfair and pretty stupid anyways

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