We ran Doom on a 40 year old printer controller (Agfa Compugraphic 9000PS) [video]

zzdw 5 days ago 28 commentsRead Article on youtube.com

DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

77% Positive

Analyzed from 608 words in the discussion.

Discussion (28 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

EvanAnderson•about 23 hours ago

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.

vardump•about 22 hours ago

The pregnancy test had altered innards. So it was fake.

kibibu•about 7 hours ago

Not fake exactly

The achievement was using the screen, not actually running the rendering engine.

Everybody else misinterpreted the original hack.

EvanAnderson•about 21 hours ago

Sadness for that, and for my inability to read in-depth.

vardump•about 18 hours ago

Well, it's still a great idea and a cool project.

anthk•about 20 hours ago

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).

Something1234•about 22 hours ago

What’s the graphic novel?

EvanAnderson•about 22 hours ago

I don't know. I'll ask her. She burns thru them and it may have already been returned to the library.

EvanAnderson•about 9 hours ago

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.)

somat•about 18 hours ago

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.

mkovach•about 22 hours 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•about 22 hours ago

Writing a Forth for hardware that originally ran PostScript would have been an interesting decision.

anthk•about 20 hours ago

I'm running EForth under subleq right now (https://github.com/howerj/subleq)

lizardking•about 22 hours ago

Looks roughly as smooth as it looked on my 25mhz 386

fipar•about 19 hours ago

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!

hyperman1•about 5 hours ago

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.

bombcar•about 3 hours ago

Probably AMD’s: https://redhill.net.au/c/c-4.php

saltcured•about 17 hours ago

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.

egypturnash•about 20 hours ago

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...

rubberfoxes•about 3 hours ago

Boy do I have the video for you...

https://youtu.be/oEqvYXYI56s

peteforde•about 24 hours ago

This is freaking awesome.

Aardwolf•about 20 hours ago

Now please do it on a Cray-1 from 1976!

estomagordo•about 23 hours ago

Now do Crysis

eschaton•about 17 hours ago

Go to any Vintage Computer Festival and ask the people exhibiting how clever and witty they think questions about running Crysis are.

vardump•about 19 hours ago

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.

esafak•about 22 hours ago

Agfa: now there's a name you don't see any more.

tonyedgecombe•about 22 hours ago

There were so many companies in that sector back in the eighties and nineties. It seemed like every conglomerate had a division making printers.

esafak•about 19 hours ago

Indeed. I once had a Star dot matrix printer. Amazingly they still make printers, among other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Micronics