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Comment by opan | Hacker News Reader

>Cringely posted pictures of the boards, the SD cards that would hold the open-source Minecraft server software, and the plastic shells etched by a laser cutter that would serve as the cases.

For others who have played plenty of Minecraft but never heard the term "mineserver" used, sounds like he was trying to rewrite the Minecraft game server software.

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That's the ambiguity in the way we use some words like "server". If I say I'm going to "build a web server", you don't know if I'm developing software to compete with nginx, or building an x86 box and installing nginx on it.

That's the weird part. It's trivially simple to run a Minecraft server. Slap whatever your favorite variant of Linux is, install Java, run minecraft-server.jar. Make a service for it (heck I made one many years ago, probably still works: https://gist.github.com/chungy/0b2c438c7db90b32701a).

Once you have the Raspberry Pis, pre-installing an operating system to run the standard Minecraft server should be the easy part.

Unless, of course, it really was a case of "reverse engineer and reimplement Minecraft to make my own server." Not strictly impossible, but a completely unreasonable goal.

> Unless, of course, it really was a case of "reverse engineer and reimplement Minecraft to make my own server." Not strictly impossible, but a completely unreasonable goal.

Hasn't that already been done several times? There's feather-rs (fairly mature but reduced set of features) and Pumpkin and FerrumC. And, for that matter, Paper - that one is Java and I haven't checked to what degree it's just borrowing from the original implementation, but I do know that Paper is actually used for real servers.

There are quite a few (the protocol is pretty simple and the client is very forgiving of omissions). They are often not as fully featured as the official server, though. Probably the most significant omission on most of them is world generation (I've seen some suggestions that this is kind of an unofficial line in terms of not catching legal threats).

I've hosted a Minecraft server, reading this I immediately thought that a Pi was just not powerful enough to do an adequate job at running one. Perhaps they figured that out once it was too late?

I had the same thought. Using one for yourself and probably a friend or two in the LAN could work, but I doubt it can run a proper server with a reasonable amount of slots. Maybe the first real test opened his eyes, but he still underestimated the problem.

A non-scam product would probably be targeted exactly at that scenario: plug it in, run a server for a handful of friends. Likely anything more than 10 players would never depend on a product like this.

For family and friends, this should be adequate.

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