In the past we have seen games like Doom run on very strange platforms, including a printer, a thermostat and an ATM. Now it is Quake's turn. The Finnish programmer Pekka Väänänen decided to play this FPS classic on a Hitachi V-422 oscilloscope, which basically turns it into a fascinating 'demake'.
A project that you can find fairly easily on the Web comes down to taking an old computer, stripping out its parts and replacing them with modern hardware. Some consider this a sacrilege, but that feeling has not stopped ideas such as putting a Raspberry Pi inside a Commodore 64 system. There are also other options, starting with developing interfaces that connect 'retro' components to current computers. Writing every day with an IBM Model M keyboard from 1993 is compelling proof of that; still, some enthusiasts prefer to go even further.
It is likely that the initiative of the Finnish programmer Pekka Väänänen has no direct precedents. After all, the average user does not have many reasons to connect an oscilloscope to a computer. On the other hand... Väänänen is not an average user. The technical report he published on his personal blog is more advanced than we expected, and the fact that he used a Hitachi V-422 oscilloscope (some twenty years old) is even more surprising.
The first level of Quake consists of unstable lines, and the sense of depth conveyed by the screen is very hard to resolve at first, but the point is that practice has accompanied theory correctly, and playing Quake on an oscilloscope is no longer a delirious dream.
Väänänen has uploaded the audio files on his official site so that any interested party can play the first level of Quake on their personal oscilloscopes. One of the modifications he had to make to his setup was replacing the sound card with a USB equivalent, to eliminate a low-frequency noise that affected playback on the oscilloscope.
Why is Väänänen's achievement important? Because it renders a kind of homage to the famous Tennis for Two that William Higinbotham presented in October 1958. That was the second electronic game to use a screen for displaying graphical elements, and the screen in question was an oscilloscope.
https://old.neoteo.com/it-runs-doom-los-10-aparatos-mas-extranos-que-corren-doom/
