We ran Doom on a 40 year old printer controller (Agfa Compugraphic 9000PS) [video]
by EvanAnderson
2 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by lizardking
1 subcomments
- Looks roughly as smooth as it looked on my 25mhz 386
by egypturnash
1 subcomments
- 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...
- This is freaking awesome.
- Now please do it on a Cray-1 from 1976!
by estomagordo
2 subcomments
- Now do Crysis
- Agfa: now there's a name you don't see any more.
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