I think he should also go for the other meaning of "plays doom" and set it up as a sequencer which sends keyboard and mouse inputs, like a 900 pound TASbot.
The magnetic drum memory/storage is a fascinating precursor to RAM and hard drives, performing both functions simultaneously. The vacuum tubes only store the next set of processor instructions to be executed
*a song from Doom
Yeah I felt like that part was misleading, and undercut how cool of an accomplishment this actually was.
I would also be quicker to accept it if they stated really clearly at the beginning that it actually only plays a song, but it instead left me watching the whole video waiting for them to get to explaining how the got the actual game working.
To be fair, it also does the graphics, but on a line printer, one frame per page.
Not exactly realtime.
Sadly there is no chance that machine did anything close to rendering those printouts. The Bendix has about 8kb of memory and no random access storage so rendering even a single room using raycasting (instead of the BSPs that Doom uses) is a stretch, and adding an output routine is just going to blow your memory budget. You can't even use those 8kb of memory like an old microcomputer, it's arranged as 2,200 29 bit words. It might just be possible to have it render a single simple box room using raycasting into some kind of data structure in memory, and then load an output routine from paper tape to print it out, but even that will require the programmer to be very clever.
Does it? I watched this video and the explanation of how they (mostly Bill in Vermont) did it had barely enough room for the song data. I think the line graphics might have been some good story telling
It was likely just a proof of concept run in the emulator. I'd guess it would be wildly impractical to get even that version of doom on real paper tape
The first version of Doom was around 2.4MB. ASR33 8-bit tape is 10 chars/inch.
So that's around 20 kilofeet of tape, or 440 miles.
Ah yes, and I watched all 29 minutes to find out. It was still very interesting though and I’m still impressed. Not sure what the terminal program they showed at the beginning was, but the thing only “plays doom” (theme song)
Fake clickbait.