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Browser demo makes Doom playable through an IBM Z terminal
A browser demo lets users play Doom on an IBM Z mainframe through an SSH-connected text terminal, with the game’s graphics rendered as coloured ASCII characters. It matters less as a feat of getting Doom to run on the hardware, which has been done in many forms, than as an entertaining demonstration of making it playable through a terminal.
The demo uses WND Software’s terminal emulator and Wojciech Graj’s DOOM-ASCII, and requires no installation or login. There is no sound, and distant objects can be difficult to make out, but the game is playable; sessions last up to five minutes, with capacity for 50 simultaneous users.
In short
- Doom is playable as coloured ASCII on an IBM Z mainframe.
- The browser demo needs no login or installation.
- Sessions are limited to five minutes.
Explained simply
Doom is a first-person action game released in 1993, in which players move through three-dimensional levels and fight enemies. Its simple graphics and flexible software have led people to adapt it for many kinds of computers and devices.
IBM Z is a family of large computers, known as mainframes, used by organisations to handle substantial workloads. SSH is a way to connect securely to another computer; a text terminal usually displays typed commands and characters rather than conventional graphics. In this demo, coloured text characters stand in for the game’s images.
The example brings together WND Software’s terminal emulator and Wojciech Graj’s DOOM-ASCII project. It shows how a game can be made playable through a text-based connection, though the character graphics have limits: there is no sound, and distant objects may be hard to see.
Read the full article at the source →
Originally published by The Register as “Doom delivers five minutes of terminal violence on an IBM mainframe”.