But, Can It Run Doom? 

Me, too! Self-hosting would be fun, too.

It's the programming/gaming equivalent to "But can he beat Goku though?"

@@flavourously nah, that one gotta be "can it run crysis?"

But can it display bad apple? Yes it can if it has some way of interaction and 2 colors at minimum it can.

John Carmack made doom run on my 486 25mhz , that was impressive, makng it run on a 160mhz state of the art instruction set processor? meh i guess thats impressive(i couldnt do that). But a terrible benchmark for any aspiring programmmer. Make doom run at 30fps on my 486 25mhz machine and ill be impressed, John couldnt do that.

The only thing that makes things complicated is people who don't really understand what they're doing. If you just start digging and using and growing, eventually your sense of what is intuitive will begin to mirror the world we live in. Don't accept something being "complicated" as an answer. Dig. Because if something is _actually_ is complicated, it means the people who made it didn't understand what they were doing. And you can do better.

@@CNLohr I needed to hear this, about needing to DIG if I don't understand something. Or think it is too complicated. Thank you.

@@CNLohr In most of my drawback in programming is I don't read (or memories) the datasheet(reference) for the language/library/device I wanted to work on, it the most reason why I don't program in C/C++

@@مقاطعمترجمة-ش8ث If you read the datasheets, they start helping you "think" like the designers/authors thought. It is hard to read/process, I know, but that's because it's breaking your brain from the natural way you think, to think in the way that the other engineers think. And it's incredibly valuable to change the way you think.

@@CNLohr amen bro

You should look at my project. It should give you a pretty good idea of what you really need to make one.

@@CNLohr I will, thanks!

i am literally working on the same project

Clearly your new goal for this CPU is going to have to be to make it run doom, now

@@viviansusername Thats what we all have in mind...

Dig deeper, what you learn will always have applicability!

Crocodiles with big mouths, long legs and short arms will be cut down in no time, maybe it will pay off if you start expanding what you know instead of getting stuck.

What @@CNLohr said. If you love programming, you'll LOVE low-level development once you get it. It's often much simpler than high-level frameworks and that stuff.

@@Kniffel101 A lot of low level stuff is just about being obsessed with documentation.

@@0ri3z3r0 I wouldn't say convoluted. But maybe not-obvious, and you're DEF right that there's a huge lack of learning resources. Everyone wants to make a video about some new javascript framework, but no one's excited to explain really deep principles from 1994.

IKR? It just feels magical when things "come to life" when they become turing complete.

Do I smell an incoming pull request? I don't fully understand what you are suggesting, but the code is available and simple!

This sounds like it would be super flickery, and I don't think there is enough time to anything like stacking frames or doing much in the way of effects.

@@CNLohr I think they are suggesting to write to the terminal so fast that the ASCII characters blend in with each other. (Imagine reduced opacity on multiple overlayed text characters where lower layers show through) And all that sorting stuff is probably to get the best combination of characters to layer.

@@iXenox Oh, that makes sense. That would be neat to see.

@@CNLohr Instead of cycling through the input pixels to an ASCII character you could just average all of the pixels' RGB values that contribute to an ASCII character. That would be more stable. There's also room for employing the various box drawing ASCII characters and effectively treating each ASCII character more like two pixels instead of one. Figuring out the optimal way to represent a set of pixels with an ASCII character could be a whole project unto itself! I definitely think averaging the pixels into the output ASCII character is the way to go though. Outright discarding pixels just feels wrong!

you can learn

@@CNLohr you can learrn to type ;)

@@c0smo709 thx fixed.

Oh hi Bradley!

Deckard sees you...

hurrfff that would be really hard. And it would be really slow.

Thanks. I hope! Though it looks like it's already starting to cool down. Didn't really go very far outside youtube.

@@CNLohr try posting on Reddit ! (Also i wanted to recomment changing the thumbnail but you already did, looks better now 😁)

I want to Rephrase it from "can it run doom" to "how long till it runs doom"

Your comment did make the video!

Thank you!

It would be a lot more text to pipe through the oddball spigot.

@@CNLohr fair at that, although terminal emulators can usually be set to allow pretty fast speeds...also, I've seen people use the half-block characters (one half background color, one half foreground color), is the current way getting more detail, or is that also excess data transmission? it'd need slightly more computation I suppose, but effectively give a canvas of pixels, twice the height and same width as you'd fit with normal characters (with square pixels!)

INTERESTING. I will have to investigate this!!

With non euclidean graphics

😱

I really don't think it would work well :-/ your eyes would fix on the false-stereo-fusion.

My emulated CPU is only around 200MHz on my laptop, so it shouldn't be _that_ much faster.

I am not sure if I'd want to focus more on doom or the work I've done to be able to cram it into mini cupcake of an executable.

@@CNLohr why not both!

If you really want a DOOM deep dive, check out Fabrice Sanglard's Game Engine Black Book for it.

audiolink.dev/

That is possible. Though I have not debugged it yet.

Or without.

Thanks!

I think they are one in the same.

I tryyy

I'm sure the internet is on it.

@@CNLohr true, true.

audiolink.dev/

I still haven't done anything to support other screen sizes

@@CNLohr I was joking. But it would be better than Tetris.

We'll see how long I can keep the momentum going.

AudioLink Console audiolink.dev

It may or may not happen. Not sure.

I love to teach and inspire and see what people do as they get tools in their hands that they never knew existed.

Best answer!

It's where the brain goes when it's trying to avoid doing real work.

audiolink.dev/

@@CNLohr thanks!

It would just be uncomfortably unplayable. That and DOOM isn't exactly the smallest footprint, memory wise.

I feel like Ben Eater might have just been zapped in the back of his head.

Thank you. But the real magic is in the Carmack Code.

I have thought about using it, but it's all so much more complicated than the naive approach.

@@CNLohr I never used it but I was under the impression that it just takes a pointer to a framebuffer and outputs the characters so it would be perfect for this. In fact you can already run doom on aalib in a way, because SDL supports it as a video driver, so chocolate doom using SDL can run in a terminal using aalib. Great channel btw, ive watched a bunch of your videos recently :)

there is esp32 ports... so I dont see why not

I agree, it should work.

And quirky.

google charles babbage's difference engine

@@CNLohr what

thanks

🤤

It can. Though that matters more about the specific silicon surrounding the core.

audiolink.dev/

Are any of them controlled with individually addressable LEDs?

I suppose so.

Someone's already added support for 256-color terminals.

If you're interested, you could totes make a PR.

where should I start looking to find where it makes graphics into ascii?

I play it fast and loose.

I have thought about this a lot. And talked to others in the community. But I haven't had the "hook" to make it happen. It's a lot of work to make videos, and unless I'm relatively confident they'll get a lot of views it's hard to make them.

Depends on the video mode. 0xA000:0000 or somewhere in the B's.

Yup! Or, I grew up with an 8086 with built-in 128k EGA. You can write to all of 0xA000:0 to 0xB000:FFFF, 640x350 at 16 colors, two pages. What luxury! Or should I say &HA000 because I was mostly poking around in QBASIC at the time (yuck!). Oh but it was so weird, with the bitplanes. Took me a while to find out you need to talk to the graphics registers too, to draw any colors.

@@CNLohr yeh, I think it was the 80x?? mode? I remember having to switch. Ive just checked B800 is really the magic memory address in pascal. Im probably just remembering 16bit version. So just B800.

I am curious what kind of performance factor you see.

@@CNLohr it's interpreter, but with basic block caching (so I didn't parse instruction every time) and mmu caching(tlb's), so performance varies a lot when linux starts to flush caches. Best case is softpipe rendering glgears 100 million instructions per second, but it drops to 20mips on systemd startup. Also, I my rootfs is nfs, for ease of development

@@CNLohr also, it depends on how close to so spec you wanted to be. For example: every target of branch instructions should be 4 bytes aligned (2 bytes if C-ext supported)

Almost 30 years.

audiolink.dev/

bingo :figerguns:

Interesting point. I hadn't considered that. Are you pointing out that the atomicity of the load/store semantics will cause an issue if I am not properly emulating the memory slot? Do you mind opening a new github issue for this and explaining?

​@@CNLohr not quite, i send you PR

Sounds like a PR you should make!

@@CNLohr This also reminds me of the world cup ASCII telnet server from 2006. I don't know the Doom source code, which file contains your code for choosing the characters and letters for a given block of pixels?

Make it open source.

Or maybe a class C amp. Never got a chance to try it though.

It would likely be a lot better sized, and if you shrunk down things like the boot screen, etc. I think it would help.

@@CNLohr i grabbed the full Ultimate DOOM IWAD and used SLADE to remove all music and sound effects, all levels except for episode 1, and all unused graphics. the total file size is down from 11MB to 7MB. (where did you get 5MB mentioned in the github from?) the main bulk are the graphics (~6.1MB). reducing all of them from 256 to 2 colors would cut the size down a huge amount... but then the game would be completely monochrome. so maybe halfing the resolution and going from 256 colors to 16 would be a better idea. in theory it should have the same decrease in file size as going monochrome. or maybe some basic file IO would be better to not have to load all levels and graphics into RAM at the same time

Maybe sometime.

audiolink.dev

​@@CNLohr Thank you so much! I really liked these fonts! ❤

@@thiagofalencar llealloo is the author, not me!!

Is doom touring complete?

I put a link to the source code so you can look yourself. I tried to make it basic and document it.

google is your friend. My goal in my videos is to send you down rabbit holes and to get you to start learning!

Maybe some day.

It's just AudioLink Console audiolink.dev

​@@CNLohr don't take this the wrong way, but I would shoot myself if this was the only terminal font available. Or switch jobs I guess The font is obviously no barrier to you, I was just curious if it's a necessity

In reflection, it wouldn't have been very difficult to make Doom run on it.

Cyrix ran Doom great. It couldn't run Quake though.

Google is your friend! My goal in my videos is to send you down rabbit holes and to get you to start learning!

Get me an open source version and we shall see.

yes it does

Some things just don't need to be done.