Someone Got Doom Running in Notepad at 60 FPS, Somehow

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/doom-notepad-running-60-fps-video-clip-shooter-text/

by sandebert • 4 years ago

80 48 4 years ago

viraptor• 4 years ago

Since I haven't seen the source, I don't know how this one was made, but if you want to do something like that, there are some high performance libraries for converting images into ascii. Mainly libcaca (http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca) and aalib (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAlib) Both have integration as codecs for ffmpeg, so you can easily convert whole movies (if you really want...).

anshumankmr• 4 years ago

If it really is a playable version of Doom running in Notepad.exe, that seems like quite literal black magic to me. (I am not a game dev)

troupe• 4 years ago

Notepad doesn't really have a way to execute code as far as I know. In this case, Doom is running on the machine, but it has been modified to copy and paste the display to notepad very quickly as ASCII text.

kbelder• 4 years ago

I wonder how it reliably captures the key input if notepad is the window with focus.

lbruder• 4 years ago

If this is "just" sending keystrokes to notepad.exe, as in "ctrl-a, del, lots of keystrokes until one frame is done", then I'm actually more impressed by the speed keystrokes and redrawing are handled in the good ol' Win32 EDIT field.

anfractuosity• 4 years ago

I thought it might be using the windows equivalent of PTRACE_POKETEXT, to poke data into notepad's memory.

I've altered the contents of the gedit text editor within a linux VM, via PTRACE_ATTACH and PTRACE_PEEKTEXT/PTRACE_POKETEXT, to find and modify the text.

quietbritishjim• 4 years ago

Notepad opens files using memory mapping, so an alternative might be to open the same file also using memory mapping, and then you have shared memory directly with notepad.

Except, that would mean notepad updates the display as the file changes, and I didn't think it did that. So I think I've got something wrong.

no_time• 4 years ago

I'm actually more impressed by the speed keystrokes and redrawing are handled in the good ol' Win32 EDIT field.

I wonder what went wrong. I can't see today's MS ever living up to what the NT and desktop team delivered ~20 years ago.

Its baffling to think that the same company is responsible for Teams.

m000• 4 years ago

Comparing a windows-only minimum viable visual text editor with a cross-platform videoconferencing software which integrates with a ton of other productivity software. Sounds legit.

I get it, Teams may not work perfectly on every setup. But the same goes with practically all enterprise-level videoconferencing solutions.

bombcar4• 4 years ago

Microsoft lost the OS war and is defending Office as best they can, which includes cross-platform tooling.

MonkeyClub2• 4 years ago

Its baffling to think that the same company is responsible for Teams.

In an absolutely symmetric comparison, the Germans first gave us Goethe, and then..

Same company, but different teams I guess :)

AndrewDucker• 4 years ago

Almost certainly writing direct to memory, as per http://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notep...

bluedino• 4 years ago

Some hacker just needs to wire the output up to Visual Studio Code

teddyh2• 4 years ago

Doom is not running in Notepad, it’s being displayed in Notepad. Just like that pregnancy test display; it wasn’t actually running Doom, it was just used as a display.

jasongill2• 4 years ago

The pregnancy test thing comes up in every one of these threads about "Doom running on XYZ" - the "Doom running on a pregnancy test" was (effectively) totally fake. He removed the internals from the pregnancy test and put in a tiny OLED screen where the pregnancy test's LCD indicator had been. It wasn't even used as a display, it was simply where the display was.

(It was still cool because of the tiny OLED screen, and it was a funny story, but it's become some kind of legend because I think people took the story as "he ran Doom on the CPU and screen inside a pregnancy test!" which it's clear you saw through but I guess some people didn't)

teddyh2• 4 years ago

Oh, so it was even more fake than I thought, then.

kuschku• 4 years ago

Do note that foone uses they/them pronouns, please use those if possible :)

Also, afaik, the pregnancy test would actually have the performance necessary to run the test, just no hardware to display it.

abcd_f• 4 years ago

You are stating the obvious.

NaN13522• 4 years ago

Capture the output of DOOM (typically the dos port where the screen is super simple to read as a byte array). Do some filters on it. Render it somewhere else. YAWN.

biohax2015• 4 years ago

Lol. Do it yourself then

Bakary• 4 years ago

Why the negativity? Better whimsical projects like this than another cynical moneygrubbing attempt or polluting gadgetry

NaN13522• 4 years ago

Just getting tired of the "DOOM running on xyz" posts I guess.

YPPH• 4 years ago

I'm glad notepad.exe has avoided the modernisation trends in other Windows utilities. I wonder if there was ever a push to have a UWP replacement implemented. If so, I'm thankful to whoever knocked it back.

peterpost2• 4 years ago

That already exists!

glandium• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29477375

iamevn• 4 years ago

I had a lot of fun writing a few small games with this method, don't think I ever shared them anywhere though.

Here are the key bits:

    char* c = "Hello World!";
    HWND hwnd = FindWindow("Notepad", NULL);
    HWND edit = FindWindowEx(hwnd, NULL, "Edit", NULL);
    SendMessage(edit, WM_SETTEXT, NULL, (LPARAM)c);

huhtenberg• 4 years ago

It's rather unlikely to get you anywhere close to 60 fps. I'd guess that they do wm_settext once and then update notepad's copy of the text directly, triggering a repaint after each update.

justsomehnguy• 4 years ago

Banding suggests this.

flykespice• 4 years ago

So it is constantly sending text to the opened notepad, won't he eventually run out of memory and slow down the whole system? (or hang up)

afinlayson• 4 years ago

Although technically this is really cool, I worry that there is something more important we could be doing with our best minds?

ogurechny• 4 years ago

at 60 fps!!!

Poor copy editors couldn't display their ignorant disdain for all that geeky gaming stuff better than stating that game that had a fixed 35 updates per second loop (to match 70 Hz video mode) ran at 60 fps.

(I know that interpolated rendering has been available in ports for a long time. The engine still runs at 35, because interpolating it would drop all compatibility, and rely on arbitrary decisions on how to resample and predict trajectories defined by original constants.)

Also, something in the narcissist manner of presentation tells me the whole thing can be just a gameplay video processed with libcaca, seemingly without even aligning the source and output resolution, if we pay attention to the edges.

Someone Got Doom Running in Notepad at 60 FPS, Somehow

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