5 ms·
We ran Doom on a 40 year old printer controller (Agfa Compugraphic 9000PS) [video]
- peteforde 6mo agoThis is freaking awesome.
- estomagordo 6mo agoNow do Crysis
- vardump 6mo agoWhoever owns the rights for Crysis should open source as much as they can. Just so that Crysis can one day run on a future computationally overpowered smart toaster.
- eschaton 6mo agoGo to any Vintage Computer Festival and ask the people exhibiting how clever and witty they think questions about running Crysis are.
- EvanAnderson 6mo agoMy 12 y/o daughter recently ran into a "does it run DOOM" reference in media (I think a graphic novel-- not sure) and asked me about it. I got to explain the phenomenon and show her some examples (she found the pregnancy test to be particularly amusing). I'll have to show her this one.
- Something1234 6mo agoWhat’s the graphic novel?
- EvanAnderson 6mo agoI don't know. I'll ask her. She burns thru them and it may have already been returned to the library.
- EvanAnderson 6mo agoI was conflating. She said another kid at school (who has a self-taught programming background) talked about running DOOM on the microbit devices they started programming at school. She didn't follow the reference. (The graphic novel inquiry was an unrelated bit of cultural idiom.)
- vardump 6mo agoThe pregnancy test had altered innards. So it was fake.
- EvanAnderson 6mo agoSadness for that, and for my inability to read in-depth.
- vardump 6mo agoWell, it's still a great idea and a cool project.
- anthk 6mo agoBut you can play Zachine v3 games in a pencil, such as Zork I-III, Tristam Island, Calypso... with builtin writting recognition under some special printed sheets (where you can print and then xerox them for the cheap).
- kibibu 6mo agoNot fake exactly The achievement was using the screen, not actually running the rendering engine. Everybody else misinterpreted the original hack.
- vardump 6mo agoAlso the screen was replaced.
- mkovach 6mo ago’ve been following Adrian's Afga system series, great dive into the unknown. Realistically, I would've stopped the moment BASIC worked, called it "good enough," and then gotten distracted attempting to write a Forth for it.
- tonyedgecombe 6mo agoWriting a Forth for hardware that originally ran PostScript would have been an interesting decision.
- anthk 6mo agoI'm running EForth under subleq right now (https://github.com/howerj/subleq https://github.com/howerj/subleq)
- esafak 6mo agoAgfa: now there's a name you don't see any more.
- tonyedgecombe 6mo agoThere were so many companies in that sector back in the eighties and nineties. It seemed like every conglomerate had a division making printers.
- esafak 6mo agoIndeed. I once had a Star dot matrix printer. Amazingly they still make printers, among other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Micronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Micronics
- lizardking 6mo agoLooks roughly as smooth as it looked on my 25mhz 386
- fipar 6mo agoOn my 33mhz (I'm almost, but not quite sure about the frequency) 486 SX (yeah ...) it ran OK until the levels where you'd get a lot of monsters. In those, I had to zoom in to the smallest possible screen size and even then it was barely acceptable. So while the video is impressive and I couldn't do something like this myself, I was glad when I saw how bad it ran, as that computer of mine would a little bit more than 30yo today, so to have that beat by a 40yo printer controller would make me think I could have done something to have it run better back then!
- saltcured 6mo agoPlaying DooM on a slow machine was training for any future fire fights you might need to do in a dark room lit only by flash bulbs.
- hyperman1 6mo agoI had a 386 with 40Mhz (which does not exist, so in hindsight it must have been a clone chip) and 4MB Ram. I could run all Doom 2 levels with reasonable speed, except the last one, where 4mb just wasn't enough.
- bombcar 6mo agoProbably AMD’s: https://redhill.net.au/c/c-4.php https://redhill.net.au/c/c-4.php
- egypturnash 6mo agoI am faintly disappointed that "running Doom" did not involve printing out a series of frames at a hilariously low effective framerate, then taking the pile and using it as a flipbook. I mean, sure, major props for kludging your own video generator in there, but...
- rubberfoxes 6mo agoBoy do I have the video for you... https://youtu.be/oEqvYXYI56s https://youtu.be/oEqvYXYI56s
- egypturnash 6mo agooh hell yeah. Nice username btw. Very yiffy.
- Aardwolf 6mo agoNow please do it on a Cray-1 from 1976!
- somat 6mo agoWith regards to printer rip(raster image processer) machines. We think of this as an easy task today but historically they had to be surprisingly powerful. When I bought my sgi o2 I found it had lived it's previous life as a rip. Which blew my mind, you have this 20000 dollar machine. and they were using it for a glorified print server. Other examples are the first apple laser printer which was their most powerful computer by a large amount when it came out. And the anecdote of the sys-admin who traced mysterious long printer jobs that never printed anything back to an enterprising engineer who had figured out that it was the most powerful computer in the building and had rewritten some of his simulation code in postscript to take advantage of it.