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
Nothing in the video was about DOOM…
Toilet paper.
Used toilet paper.
Store brand used toilet paper.
Fresh toilet paper but the thermal printer is replaced by a butt
I can’t be the only one laughing.
Mostly because I fully understand the pain.
My Kodak ScanStation 500 experience very much aligns with that. It’s an equally awkward build with a mainboard that developed a power-on issue over time. Unfortunately here the seller wiped the hard drive. The scanner is a separate device and inependently usable (with compatible driver). I gave up on it 3 years ago due to scanner software an driver pain under the Linux I got installed on it.
It might be a might fine gaming rig though.. for Commander Keen.
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?
Did the end times involve you getting a new Mercedes by any chance
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.
Runaway processes having their own unthinking volition is the least weird thing in nature; the weird part is that humans think stasis and structured intelligence is default for some reason
Skip to minute 53 of the unbearable 55 minute video to see it in action.
hey :(
Complete waste of time. He could be using that time actually making something beneficial to himself or others that is more practical. Not only is this a major waste of paper, electricity, and other peoples time they will never get back, but he has a perfectly actively functioning screen to his left. Doom 2016 was a good play. The original of course always a classic. I remember playing msdos doom at a university in california on a vr machine that im pretty sure was the mother of the arcade vr machines that came out later and which i played when visiting santa cruz about 7-10 years later.
I just came here and posted to waste a tiny bit more of your one and only life. I stole it and you’ll never ever regain what was lost.
I’ve been reading hackaday for 20 years and it’s nice to know the comments today are just as dumb as they were 20 years ago.
MY GOAT WAS FEATURED 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌 celebratory hands in the air emoji
celebratory hands in the air emoji
Done something like that three decades ago. In the computer lab (ed011 room for who knows about it), one colleague found in the junk bin a vt100 terminal compatible thing. It had a keyboard and a maticeal printer for a screen. I had paper for it at home (one side already printed), so soon I was the happy owner of guitar tabulatures just printed with cat unix command.
smill has already completed minecraft on a printer. you could’ve mentioned where yo got the idea from
This site consistently features the most useless proofs of concept. I bet this guy will be glad he took the time to do this on his deathbed.
It’s fun and whimsy and if you exclude it from life and eschew all but the calculated and productive you are far more likely to have deathbed regrets.