Play DOOM in Teletext

by MasterYoda • 3 years ago

121 32 3 years ago

karim79• 3 years ago

This is fantastic. Is there a way to apply the cheats (IDKFA and IDDQD) by any chance? Fond memories of pretending to be sick so I could hijack my dad's computer to play doom.

vrtnis• 3 years ago

I highly recommend looking at the ceefax games archive on https://www.bbcmicro.co.uk/?search=Ceefax&on_P=on. Check out 'Harbor Command' for another(less sophisticated) first person game

quink• 3 years ago

That's different. This uses an infrared receiver on a Linux box to render out a teletext stream that's interpreted and displayed on a TV.

The CEEFAX games in the link on the other hand were games transmitted over CEEFAX to be loaded into a BBC Micro and played there.

Either of those things though is very cool.

bitsinthesky• 3 years ago

Nice.

jtxt• 3 years ago

Very cool project, surprised it's possible. Thanks for sharing the youtube vid on it too. (Perhaps the 3d view could use another shade of grey or two using the other colors or characters?)

sillywalk• 3 years ago

I'm always impressed by these things.

Also https://old.reddit.com/r/itrunsdoom/

JdeBP• 3 years ago

The fact that modern televisions cannot hack it is not as surprising as it might seem. A line update with the traditional hardware is 40 character writes to a dual-port VRAM. Hardware does the character generation and graphics conversions.

But modern televisions do all of the rendering to a graphics mode display buffer, and probably aren't engineered with the idea that the teletext data may be arriving so fast (as it would usually only be a few lines changing per frame in interleaved magazine mode) as to compete with other demands upon video RAM. It's probably implemented in a very basic way, because it was good enough.

chromoblob2• 3 years ago

Interesting bit about teletext in Wikipedia:

Spanish prisons have banned or deactivate TV sets with teletext capabilities, after finding that the inmates received coded messages from accomplices outside through the bulletin board sections.[38]

anthk4• 3 years ago

Indeed. They used coded messages simulating either love affairs or second hand sales.

1letterunixname• 3 years ago

This is way more impressive than the following, but here are computer terminal options:

ttyquake (requires digging for the source) and aaquake

https://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/

There's also aalib: https://sourceforge.net/projects/aa-project/

emmanueloga_• 3 years ago

Other TUI libraries of note: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/doc/OT...

anthk4• 3 years ago

I used to do the reverse of doom on teletext. TV on aalib with aatv and later fbtv.

heywhatupboys• 3 years ago

teletext is still huge in Denmark, especially for news. Something like 50 % of all danes read it at least once a month. Also, it really avoids clickbait and long news, just straight to the point! Here, try reading some news in our national broadcasting's teletext http endpoint! https://www.dr.dk/cgi-bin/fttv1.exe/127 (url might look super sketcy, but DR.dk is basically our BBC)

We have the character å now, no clue when that happened

anthk4• 3 years ago

In Spain too for soccer results or lottery numbers.

smcl• 3 years ago

Yeah it used to be that after football games had finished for the day some pubs would shut off sound from the TV, play background music but show a teletext page cycling through the results across various leagues in UK/Europe

pluijzer• 3 years ago

Side note: I understood more or less 80%+ of that article as a Dutch.

alana314• 3 years ago

Awesome. I'd love to see a telnet service where you can play this like the star wars asciimation project.

anthk4• 3 years ago

SDL has an AAlib backend.

krm013• 3 years ago

Not fully on topic but man do I still love (and use) Teletext on a daily basis. There are many things we (designers) can learn from it. The more stuff you can display the more you have to resist the temptation to do so. Early tech radically forced you to find creative ways to get to the core of what you were trying to achieve. Now with the abundance of memory and visual capabilities, nobody is carefully making choices anymore. Turning every UI into an overkill experience.

It’s something I try to push for when crafting new designs for startups at our firm.

rob742• 3 years ago

Yeah, it's especially good for a quick news update because of the limitation to one page per article (not sure exactly how many characters you can fit in, but it's not a lot).

krm013• 3 years ago

Just thinking about Teletext and its limitations got me so inspired, I just wrote some thoughts about why it's so amazing and how it should be a source of inspiration for product design in general: https://fairpixelsco.medium.com/teletext-when-less-was-more-...

jeffhuys• 3 years ago

My parents also still use teletext. Which I don't understand - they both have iPads and also use that for email, news, etc, but still use teletext on a daily basis.

Can I ask you - why do you still use it?

krm013• 3 years ago

I use it on my iPhone. It has a HN vibe. In a few seconds, no pictures, I get the main headlines. I've also noticed that the folks that write the Teletext headlines do so much more concise. They have limited characters, and need to get the main point across. So it also forces the writers to not add fluff, just get to the core of it.

Just overall, it lets me consume news much faster. No ads. no images, no fluff.

mejutoco• 3 years ago

Someone I know uses it to check the result of football matches. They have the number memorized and just go straight to the page of interest. Pretty efficient.

_trampeltier• 3 years ago

Yes, I also know a lot of people (switzerland) who use it for sport results. It works well on the cellphone app and it's just do it's thing. No bs, just info.

tw1984• 3 years ago

surely running doom on that teletext remote control should be the next goal? :)

m_eiman• 3 years ago

Cool!

I think that image quality could be improved by using a suitable dithering algorithm, the current logic seems a bit simplistic. Could be a nice summer project for my highschooler…

rob742• 3 years ago

Hmm, so all the game graphics are monochrome? They could use color, at least for the sprites (monsters, powerups, incoming fireballs etc.) to make them more easy to see. In Teletext the colors are set at character level, and there's only 8 of them, but at least that's something...

RedNifre• 3 years ago

How does it achieve this frame rate? I thought teletext would cycle through the pages 100 to 899, sending one per frame? I guess the pages themselves are numbered and this only sends page 100 on every frame?

Regarding not being able to "run" doom in teletext: I guess you could create a "game book" style experience with the 800 pages and use the colored buttons on the remote for "turn left", "turn right", "forward", "shoot/interact"; IIRC those were shortcuts for some relative page numbers on the current page.

chromoblob2• 3 years ago

I guess the pages themselves are numbered and this only sends page 100 on every frame?

Yes, Wikipedia seems to confirm.

nicbvs• 3 years ago

Of course this is made by a ThinkPad user

codeulike• 3 years ago

Where I'm from we call this graphics format "Mode 7"

Play DOOM in Teletext

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