Some insane person/genius made Quake run on an oscilloscope

Oscilloscopes have come a long way since the old glory days of Tennis for Two (a game which makes Pong look like hot garbage), and now some genius has made Quake run on one of those damn things. Here's an article describing the process, and here's a video of the gameplay:

I love that despite the groovy wavy-line nature of the oscilloscope lines, it's still recognizably Quake. I also like that since this version removes all textures, the triangular nature of all the polygons suddenly become very clear. All the flat rectangular surfaces are divided up into triangles, revealing how that stuff actually works.

Man, oscilloscopes are cool-looking. I feel like there should be a revival in vector-graphics games, they look so darn neat. This should be like a mini-game in Alien: Isolation or something.

Holy fucking shit.

That's just amazing, dumb, brilliant, gorgeous, awesome, fantastic.....that's just really fucking cool to see. I'll read the article when I get the chance today!

Oh my god, wow. That's incredible...

That is the best thing I've ever seen in my life.

This is completely insane and also completely amazing.

Holy shiitake mushrooms, Batman!

That is amazing and then you read their "open problems" section; "I was quite disappointed by the performance I got out of this." What the hell are you talking about, Pekka?

That looks like what people in the 80's envisioned "cyber space" to look like. It's also very awesome.

Saints Row devs are pissed they haven't already thought to put this in the game.

That's incredible.

I want to see that as an art aesthetic. Some game where you shift between normal polygonal world and the Oscilloverse.

Awesome. awesome. awesome.

Not to detract from this really awesome thing, but it should be noted that the game isn't "running" on the oscilloscope, the game is running on a PC and the oscilloscope is being used to display it (the article explains in more detail what's going on in-between).

As I said, this is awesome and incredible nonetheless!

Fair enough, I should've been clearer in my title. Oscilloscopes (at least the old classic ones) aren't really computers, they're just a kind of dumb analog display, a cathode ray shooting electrons on a screen according to changes in voltages (like a dumber CRT, or vector graphics monitor). You couldn't run anything "on" them, in that sense. Even Tennis for Two used external electronics.

Still, though, dude modified the Quake engine to spit out an audio signal, which, when passed through the sound card to an oscilloscope, drew the Quake levels. That's motherfucking intense.

That is... gorgeous.

This is so damn awesome but the real question if it runs in solid 60fps

Because why not?

That's insane, but it makes me feel sick watching it.

Ya, this is a tiny bit misleading. He's not running it on an oscilloscope, but rather he's displaying it on one. At least that's what I understood.

I was confused until I read the article because I was wondering how he controlled it and where the sound was coming from. The oscilloscope, no matter how much you mess with it- as far as I know, won't have that depth of sound or control.

Still this is very cool to see. I agree with him, though. It could be better. The frame stutter near the end could probably be fixed with more tweaking.

Of course, I don't know if I'm smart enough to do it in the first place, but I just mean I see what he means when he says that.

Truthfully he is really just just displaying it on an oscilloscope with a computer running an interaptive display program to render the graphics on a vector display.

So, in reality, he could "play" Doom on a Vectrex or on an Asteroids machine too.

@rethla said:

Better than that, it's running at an infinite number of frames per second! Or zero depending on how you look at it. The little green dot is tracing an analog signal in real time. There are no frames, though the computer running the game can only produce those images that are being turned into analog signals at a certain rate. And we're only seeing it via a compressed Youtube movie which is running at a certain number of frames, so yeah...

motherofgod.... awesome!

I was not aware this was even remotely possible; I had thought oscilloscopes were incredibly limited in what and how they could project - because of the usual sine wave graphs, I had thought it was limited to a very linear mode of displaying. This is amazing. Useless, but nonetheless amazing. Everyone, be sure to remember what you were doing so you can tell your grandkids.

Virtual Boy 2.

Very awesome. For people wanting to some more madness like this an artist made a song that is it's on music video when you pipe the audio to an oscilloscope.

This certainly beats the printer running Doom.

That is fucking rad. It's like what 80s/early 90s "VR" (in quotes) looked like.

Incredible.

That draw distance, though.

I had that exact oscilloscope, but I gave it to a goodwill.

That's amazing!

They need to do it with original Doom, continuing the long tradition of making sure Doom runs on every electronic device with a screen ever created.