We ran Doom on a 40 year old printer controller (Agfa Compugraphic 9000PS) [video]
51 points by zdw 5 days ago | 21 comments
EvanAnderson 6 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.
replyvardump 4 hours ago
The pregnancy test had altered innards. So it was fake.
replySomething1234 5 hours ago
What’s the graphic novel?
replyEvanAnderson 4 hours ago
I don't know. I'll ask her. She burns thru them and it may have already been returned to the library.
replymkovach 5 hours ago
’ve been following Adrian's Afga system series, great dive into the unknown.
replyRealistically, I would've stopped the moment BASIC worked, called it "good enough," and then gotten distracted attempting to write a Forth for it.
tonyedgecombe 4 hours ago
Writing a Forth for hardware that originally ran PostScript would have been an interesting decision.
replylizardking 4 hours ago
Looks roughly as smooth as it looked on my 25mhz 386
replyfipar 2 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.
replySo 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!
egypturnash 3 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.
replyI mean, sure, major props for kludging your own video generator in there, but...
esafak 5 hours ago
Agfa: now there's a name you don't see any more.
replytonyedgecombe 4 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.
replyesafak 2 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
reply
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.