That got me thinking “I wonder if anyone has done this on an oscilloscope” and oddly I can't fine anyone who quite has. That DOOM objects are sprites and not actual 3D objects would limit the fidelity, but the scenery could be rendered at least. There are several examples of managing to use a high-speed scope as a low-res monochrome raster device (scanning like a CRT monitor does and turning the beam on & off as needed).

I did find an example of Quake being done on a scope the way I was imagining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMli33ornEU - as all objects are actual 3D models in Quake that even manages to give them some presence & shape.

EDIT: then I read the second half of this post and saw ScopeDoom! I'm surprised there are no earlier examples that are easy to find.

Was never quite sure if I should raw XY it or soft modem so I could decode on a web page on a handy device.

I've written my own s-expr library to inject footprints and symbols and it's a huge pain and flakey. I'd love to move to something a bit more fleshed out and official.

KiDoom I don't fully get. The website says "All components connected to a shared net; the PCB could be sent to a fab house (it just wouldn't do anything useful)" but I don't see any of the component pins hooked up in the demo video.

The part I love most is how many unrelated systems had to cooperate:

extracting geometry directly from DOOM’s drawsegs/vissprite internals

mapping sprite classes to physical component footprints

running real-time updates through KiCad’s object model without triggering full recompute

and then running the same vector stream to an oscilloscope via audio DAC

That’s a really clever chain of “use the tool for something it was never designed to do.”

ScopeDoom might end up being the more interesting long-term direction, vector displays force you to think about rendering differently, and there’s something poetic about DOOM being rendered as literal analog voltage traces.

If you ever take it further, the combination of:

faster DAC (or multi-kHz arbitrary waveform generator)

true analog persistence phosphor scope

and dynamic sprite simplification

…could get you surprisingly close to a smooth vector-shooter aesthetic.

Either way: great hack. The world needs more playful abuse of serious tools.