High Tech Or Hangover? Watch Quake On An Oscilloscope

Head spinning? Stomach gurgling? Did you just drink a Bloody Mary just to find some respite from your pounding gulliver? Why not take a look at Pekka Väänänen’s project, an attempt to play Quake on a Hitachi V-422 oscilloscope.

Why? Because if it can’t run Quake it’s not a true piece of technological hardware, that’s why. But it’s pretty hard. To get the machine to display a comparatively complicated game, Väänänen had to simulate an oscilloscope in code and then learn how to program the Hitachi to move the ray across the screen.

In order to line draw line segments that are not connected together, you need to move the ray quickly across the screen without actually tracing a visible line. This can be done by spending more time drawing the visible lines and then scaling the monitor intensity accordingly to hide unwanted artefacts.

To actually display the images he had to output the results in audio format and got about 1,800 on the screen. You can even download some audio files to play the screens on your own workbench.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/wby3N-PKtQE/

via IFTTT