What a great write up, and a video too! Even though Minecraft stuff ofc was a bit of a bait, it would be interesting see the answer to "Can it run Doom?".
What a great write up, and a video too! Even though Minecraft stuff ofc was a bit of a bait, it would be interesting see the answer to "Can it run Doom?".
From the article:
Only 40,960 words of memory. That’s only 90kb total memory to split between our code and the memory it needs at runtime.
Looking at a copy of Doom on the Internet Archive (https://ia800404.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/15...), DOOM.EXE is about 709k, and DOOM.WAD is about 11159k.
I think that's a pretty solid no.
Also it's a 250khz CPU. Not megahertz. Kilohertz. It's slower than the 1MHZ 8-bit home computers like the Apple ][ or c64.
"Running" Doom might be possible with some insane hack that offloads storage and/or processing to more modern hardware crammed into the UNIVAC case but given that this is one of two UNIVACs in the entire world, and the only one that actually runs, I don't think the museum is gonna let anyone cram a Raspberry Pi up in there.
> a bit of a bait
"a bit" is doing a lot of work there. It was absolute nonsense. They were no closer to running a Minecraft server than I am to running UKGOV.
They hosted a program that allowed minecraft clients to connect... I'd class that as a minecraft server, even if it wasn't a very good one
> They hosted a program that allowed minecraft clients to connect...
Connect in the sense of receiving a login packet and saying "yes". That's it. Steps 1, 2, 3, 9, 10 of [0] (they didn't mention encryption or compression, I'm assuming they didn't implement it.)
They didn't mention anything about any of the steps past 10 - again, assuming they didn't implement them.
It's a trivial thing they've implemented - good work, sure, but a Minecraft server? Absolutely not.
[0] https://minecraft.wiki/w/Java_Edition_protocol/FAQ#What's_th...?
Not enough dedotated wam for all that.
Yeah, my thought exactly, execution lacked, but i do admire the attempt.
It could probably run the code for doom, once recompiled for the risc-v emulator, but given that the only output is a paper teletype, displaying it would be a problem
> but given that the only output is a paper teletype, displaying it would be a problem
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. A cacodaemon floats by, hissing.
I wonder which would be faster: computing a frame, or printing it? If you could print one frame at a time, you could make a flip-book animation.
And given the NES emulator example, take half an hour per frame.
Feels kind of like when Usagi Eletric got "Doom" running on a vacuum tube computer with a teletype interface without support for even ASCII, but it was just an imitation of the background music.
Anything for the thumbnail.
Not Doom, but a ZMachine interpreter might run with:
- Zork I-III
- Calypso
- Tristam Island
- All the Z3 machine games at IF archive
- The rest of Infocom propietary games
https://www.ifwiki.org/List_of_Z-machine_interpreters
Also: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=lkr2jf03np19ieix
Now, if the game was libre software it could be improved and ported to Puny Inform (a 'lite' version of Inform6 tuned for smaller machines) creating a really small Z3 file being able to play it from the PDP10 and 8 bit microcomputers to anything from today. From smartphones to PDA's to GNU/Linux with Frotz to Winfrotz and Lectrote and Fabularium for Android/Mac and iOS.
So, 'does it run Doom'? Man, you can play Zork in a pen with writting detection. How cool is that?