Pekka Väänänen's Quake on an oscilloscope (via Pekka Väänänen)
Not only was December the season to be jolly, but it was also apparently the season for awesome! This holiday season, Pekka Väänänen decided to take up the challenge of playing Quake on a Hitachi V-422 oscilloscope. Luckily for others, he put out a report on how he solved some buggy issues and improved his gaming experience on an oscilloscope. So, for those of you that want to try these fixes, look no further.
While, at a first glance, I thought this was too geeky to be bothered with, I actually think Quake looks pretty awesome in an oscilloscope. So, if you ever find yourself with a bit of extra time on your hands and you have an old oscilloscope in the garage, give it a try.
First things first, if you want to try this, you can use an XY-oscilloscope simulator code that Pekka wrote in processing.
The most important troubleshooting details for drawing lines in an oscilloscope is how to draw linear lines, and lines that aren't connected to each other. The oscillator ray will basically draw lines at points over time, and setting points over time will also you to make shapes, etc. However, drawing non-connected lines can be tricky. Why? Technically, there is no way to discontinue the line. However, Pekka's fix is simple to switch to a different XY quickly enough that you don't even notice the trace line that shows the jump. Quite clever and simple enough to follow.
If you watch the video Pekka uploaded of his gaming adventure, you'll notice the nice vectorized gaming environment. To do this, he simply went to Darkplaces and used a software render program to gain access to the scene geometry which he then transferred. In a nutshell, that is the easy part of this process done. The bulk of the troubleshooting seems to be in cutting out all unnecessary lines and playing with the speed to maximize CPU processing – which is already low on an oscilloscope.
In order to cut down on visuals and processing power, Pekka got rid of all duplicate lines and entirely cut out all graphics that were towards the edge of the screen. Thus why there is a bit of a radius of dark space around the screen in Pekka's game play.
After this, tweaking to 'perfection' is a matter of playing with the audio synthesis to get straight lines that are somewhat defined – at least, defined enough to play Quake. If there are strange noises generated by the oscilloscope while playing, just up the sound card.
This has been a little taste of the process and troubleshoots involved with playing Quake on an oscilloscope, but for the full details and open sourced code from Pekka, visit: http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/oscilloscope_quake.html
By now you should have some idea as to whether you think this gaming experience is worth the effort, so go forth and tinker! Perhaps you can add tinker and play other games that look awesome on an oscilloscope, or some other unexpected technology.
C
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