Playing DOOM On A Receipt Printer

Gaming is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately for many of us, work takes up our valuable time, which should be allocated to our gaming. What if there was a better way? Well, printers can print an image quickly, and receipt printers can print a lot of images. This sounds like an effective display for DOOM in a pinch. [Bringus Studios] managed to find such a printer and got the classic shooter running. Getting the printer’s attached computer, which was only designed for printing the cost of your chicken sandwich, to run Half-Life was far from easy. [Bringus] struggled through the process of swapping operating systems from Windows 7 to Linux just to return to Windows 7 after a painful process of maintaining compatibility between 32 and 64 bit software. Driver issues followed through the entire process just to get anything running at all. But we can’t play DOOM while at work on a normal screen. The printer MUST display our glorious 480p gameplay. To achieve such a workflow, [Bringus] implemented a script to print out a frame of the display, allowing for “visible gameplay”. Along with some heat issues from the nature of thermal receipts, eventually the printer displayed the glory of DOOM . Playing games on a thermal printer might be one of the weirdest things you’ve seen today, but what if we could reverse the script a bit and create a printer from something else? Here at Hackaday, we have exactly the thing for you: a p rinter made from a vintage typewriter ! Thanks [DjBiohazard] for the tip!

Preview: ~260 words