
Quake on an oscilloscope (2014) - Ivoah
http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/oscilloscope_quake.html
======
tyingq
Trammel Hudson's vector display and oscilloscope tagged articles are worth a
look as well:
[https://trmm.net/Category:Vector_display](https://trmm.net/Category:Vector_display)

Also the hostile treatment he got from the MAME developers is kind of amusing:
[https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/483](https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/483)

~~~
sandos
I dont see the response as hostile, at all! It all sounded very reasonable to
me.

~~~
tomxor
I read it all... it is hostile, the MAME owner clearly can't be bothered and
just wants to close it, and while I can empathise with being inundated with
PRs, it's still possible to be accommodating without actually donating much
time, you just need to point people in the right direction. and in the event
that something is fundamentally incompatible with the project (which this is
not) you can show a little class.

~~~
slededit
The patch came in barely working (not compiling on all platforms) and hacked
together. Anyone who's worked on a long lived code base knows good
architecture is important.

They explained what was wrong and how to architect it cleanly. It's not the
responsibility of the MAME developers to do his work for him.

They also reasonably discussed the utility of supporting his niche closed
hardware. Remember once the code is in tree it's their responsibility.

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schlowmo
This is one of those _Why would you even do that?_ followed by _Oh
well...sorry for asking, totally got it_ article.

I really applaud such curiosity.

------
azureel
More info on the old (3 years old) thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8810857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8810857)

Ps: Maybe add (2014) in the title.

~~~
dang
Done.

------
ggm
I used to play with a tektronix vector scan display at university in 1979. it
was connected to a Dec-10 for specialist use. It was almost always free
because people hated the non-refresh default operational mode. I found that as
long as I somehow mentally treated it as a 2-column ASR33 typed-output device,
and did page refresh by hand, it was ok to work on (the two page thing was
just weird. it folded output down two halves of the display)

Its debug-demo mode was uber-cool. you could plot sine waves to your hearts
content. I had a lot of fun on that.

~~~
exikyut
To see what this looks like:

1\. Open xterm

2\. If you use a fancy prompt with colors in it, turn it off (eg with "export
PROMPT_COMMAND= PS1='$ '")

3\. CTRL+Middleclick on the window, then "Switch to Tek mode" (it's near the
bottom). Note that you must keep the mouse button held down and _release_ it
over the option you want.

4\. Repeatedly press Enter to make the prompt fill the screen; it will sail to
the bottom of the left half of the screen (the left page) and then do the same
on the right half (the right page).

5\. "Page refresh by hand" in xterm means CTRL+middle clicking the Tek window
and selecting PAGE or RESET.

Just to clarify, Tektronix 4014 mode uses its own escape sequences that are
separate to the VTxxx series. So nothing you have installed will actually
"work" in Tek mode. (One of the arguments for removing the code from xterm.)

~~~
tyingq
You can download some sample escape sequences to see what it does.

Like this one:
[https://github.com/joejulian/xterm/blob/master/tektests/usma...](https://github.com/joejulian/xterm/blob/master/tektests/usmap.tek)

Download it using the githib raw link and cat it while the xterm is in tek
mode.

~~~
Aloha
that's pretty impressive

You can also run aclock on on an emulated tek terminal.

[https://github.com/tenox7/aclock](https://github.com/tenox7/aclock)

Though you need to download the tek source (its one file) and compile it.

------
hawski
It could be fun to use some code from this Quake version and something like
the drawille [1]. As a result one could play this Quake on a terminal.

There is C implementation - libdrawille [2].

[1]
[https://github.com/asciimoo/drawille](https://github.com/asciimoo/drawille)

[2]
[https://github.com/Huulivoide/libdrawille](https://github.com/Huulivoide/libdrawille)

~~~
mjb
Sadly ttyquake seems to be gone from the internet, but aaquake2 lives on:
[https://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/](https://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/)

------
nicolashahn
The aesthetic effect is amazing.

~~~
crush-n-spread
I feel that we're only getting the half of it since we're seeing 30-40fps
video, but in real life it's going to be much different than what we see.

------
trowaybloway
> This means the frequencies emitted are very high (5 samples per period is
> 19.2 kHz) > and it seems the audio output is being low pass filtered
> resulting in silly wobbly lines.

Sound Card output is low pass filtered. With a 22KHz cutoff filter frequency,
a digital square wave at 22KHz would optimally render as sine of the same
period, because that's the base frequency. Resonant frequencies are filtered
because they are not audible. That's the principle of digital-analog
conversion obeying the sampling theorem.

~~~
amelius
I wonder what the result would look like if they didn't use a sound-card, but
a DA-converter with wider bandwidth.

------
codewritinfool
I used to do this on my standup arcade "Battlezone" machine before I got the
video system working. I didn't have Z blanking, so all of the repositioning
line segments were visible, but it was completely playable.

------
SimonSword91
Remembers me of [http://compsci.ca/blog/the-difference-between-computer-
scien...](http://compsci.ca/blog/the-difference-between-computer-scientist-
and-computer-engineer-according-to-smbc/)

------
tomxor
I caught it late first time round so... just want to say this is awesome and
made me smile, it feels like an embodiment of what hacking is all about (to me
at least).

------
cobbzilla
this is so cool. I'd love to play a few rounds of Quake team fortress where
everyone has to use an oscilloscope as their display.

------
cjsuk
I notice the X-Y mode on my rigol DSO is crap compared to an analogue scope.
No hope of ever running it on that.

------
htor
pretty darn cool to listen to as well:
[http://www.lofibucket.com/download/e1m1_fast_48khz.flac](http://www.lofibucket.com/download/e1m1_fast_48khz.flac)

------
ctdonath
Still & so waiting for a port of Quake to iPhone. Doom is in App Store, Quake
should be.

