Gaming is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately for many of us, work takes up our valuable time, which should be allocated to our gaming. What if there was a better way? Well, printers can print an image quickly, and receipt printers can print a lot of images. This sounds like an effective display for DOOM in a pinch. [Bringus Studios] managed to find such a printer and got the classic shooter running.
Getting the printer’s attached computer, which was only designed for printing the cost of your chicken sandwich, to run Half-Life was far from easy. [Bringus] struggled through the process of swapping operating systems from Windows 7 to Linux just to return to Windows 7 after a painful process of maintaining compatibility between 32 and 64 bit software. Driver issues followed through the entire process just to get anything running at all.
But we can’t play DOOM while at work on a normal screen. The printer MUST display our glorious 480p gameplay. To achieve such a workflow, [Bringus] implemented a script to print out a frame of the display, allowing for “visible gameplay”. Along with some heat issues from the nature of thermal receipts, eventually the printer displayed the glory of DOOM.
Playing games on a thermal printer might be one of the weirdest things you’ve seen today, but what if we could reverse the script a bit and create a printer from something else? Here at Hackaday, we have exactly the thing for you: a printer made from a vintage typewriter!
Thanks [DjBiohazard] for the tip!
Next up: doom on an etch-a-sketch
Toilet paper.
Used toilet paper.
I can’t be the only one laughing.
Mostly because I fully understand the pain.
Playing games on a thermal printer might be one of the weirdest things you’ve seen today…
Sad to say, not even close.
Okay, I’ll bite.
What was the weirdest thing you saw today?
The end of earth as we know it in a vision through my scrying glass. Oh you meant the other person?
The weirdest ongoing thing is the need to prove to robot that you are not a robot.
Similarly how you HAVE to show a birth certificate to prove that you were born. Your presence seem to be inconclusive, since you are downgraded to the status of the Birth Certificate Demonstrator.
In that sense thermal printer GPU is no weirder than that – it is just using what one has at hand, punch cards, etc. Actually, now that I think of it, printed screen has the advantage of giving one extra time to process the output, pause, re-examine, etc. Bureaucracies of the world have such luxury in unlimited quantities, they can pause, regroup, rethink with zero consequences, while we, lowly humans, have to breath, eat, sleep, etc. I wish we, too, could pause things we want to be paused (wars, famine, COVID, snow storms, politicians, etc), rest, regroup, rethink, no, we have zero control. To me THAT is the weirdest thing, runaway processes having their own volition unconnected to Real Life.