Play Quake on an Oscilloscope

Happy Holiday’s everyone! Did you all have a good break? Or do you not want to answer hypotheticals to an online journalist and just want to get to the article? I’m going to assume the latter and cut the intro short.

When you talk about classic FPS’s, usually you’re talking about Doom—Doom has been played on screens as small as a graphing calculator or an inkjet printer and as large as a movie theater screen, and has been celebrated at every opportunity. But that doesn’t mean any less love can be extended to its fellow pioneer, Quake. While you might see less tributes or sequels for Quake, they still exist: and perhaps the coolest one to date was just created by Kepuli Games, a youtuber who managed to re-create Quake on a Oscilloscope. Check it out:
 


So how does this work? It’s simple enough for a skilled engineer: Quake is being run on a modified Darkspace engine, which then converts the images on the screen into 96 kHz audio signals, which a Hitachi V-422 oscilloscope reads and projects onto its screens in a kind of creepy, definitively trippy experience. While doors and portals are a little hard to see, items and enemies show up clearly, an combat is more-or-less unaltered. The Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, on the other hand, only adds to the experience.

A pretty amazing science experiment, if I say so myself. I guess with a little ingenuity and a lot of patience, just about anything can be turned into a game console... at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if someone figured out how to play Kitchen Mama on their stove!

…that might be a bad example.