My 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.
I 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.)
But 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).
With 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.
On 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!
I 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.
I 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...
My 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.
What’s the graphic novel?
I don't know. I'll ask her. She burns thru them and it may have already been returned to the library.
I 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.)
The pregnancy test had altered innards. So it was fake.
Sadness for that, and for my inability to read in-depth.
Well, it's still a great idea and a cool project.
But 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).
Not fake exactly
The achievement was using the screen, not actually running the rendering engine.
Everybody else misinterpreted the original hack.
With 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.
’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.
Writing a Forth for hardware that originally ran PostScript would have been an interesting decision.
I'm running EForth under subleq right now (https://github.com/howerj/subleq)
Looks roughly as smooth as it looked on my 25mhz 386
On 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!
Playing 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.
I 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.
Probably AMD’s: https://redhill.net.au/c/c-4.php
I 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...
Boy do I have the video for you...
https://youtu.be/oEqvYXYI56s
This is freaking awesome.
Now please do it on a Cray-1 from 1976!
Now do Crysis
Whoever 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.
Go to any Vintage Computer Festival and ask the people exhibiting how clever and witty they think questions about running Crysis are.
Agfa: now there's a name you don't see any more.
There were so many companies in that sector back in the eighties and nineties. It seemed like every conglomerate had a division making printers.
Indeed. I once had a Star dot matrix printer. Amazingly they still make printers, among other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Micronics