Play DOOM in Teletext

Not fully on topic but man do I still love (and use) Teletext on a daily basis. There are many things we (designers) can learn from it. The more stuff you can display the more you have to resist the temptation to do so. Early tech radically forced you to find creative ways to get to the core of what you were trying to achieve. Now with the abundance of memory and visual capabilities, nobody is carefully making choices anymore. Turning every UI into an overkill experience.

It’s something I try to push for when crafting new designs for startups at our firm.

I highly recommend looking at the ceefax games archive on https://www.bbcmicro.co.uk/?search=Ceefax&on_P=on. Check out 'Harbor Command' for another(less sophisticated) first person game

Interesting bit about teletext in Wikipedia:

> Spanish prisons have banned or deactivate TV sets with teletext capabilities, after finding that the inmates received coded messages from accomplices outside through the bulletin board sections.[38]

How does it achieve this frame rate? I thought teletext would cycle through the pages 100 to 899, sending one per frame? I guess the pages themselves are numbered and this only sends page 100 on every frame?

Regarding not being able to "run" doom in teletext: I guess you could create a "game book" style experience with the 800 pages and use the colored buttons on the remote for "turn left", "turn right", "forward", "shoot/interact"; IIRC those were shortcuts for some relative page numbers on the current page.

I'm always impressed by these things.

Also https://old.reddit.com/r/itrunsdoom/

This is way more impressive than the following, but here are computer terminal options:

ttyquake (requires digging for the source) and aaquake

https://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/

There's also aalib: https://sourceforge.net/projects/aa-project/

The fact that modern televisions cannot hack it is not as surprising as it might seem. A line update with the traditional hardware is 40 character writes to a dual-port VRAM. Hardware does the character generation and graphics conversions.

But modern televisions do all of the rendering to a graphics mode display buffer, and probably aren't engineered with the idea that the teletext data may be arriving so fast (as it would usually only be a few lines changing per frame in interleaved magazine mode) as to compete with other demands upon video RAM. It's probably implemented in a very basic way, because it was good enough.

teletext is still huge in Denmark, especially for news. Something like 50 % of all danes read it at least once a month. Also, it really avoids clickbait and long news, just straight to the point! Here, try reading some news in our national broadcasting's teletext http endpoint! https://www.dr.dk/cgi-bin/fttv1.exe/127 (url might look super sketcy, but DR.dk is basically our BBC)

We have the character å now, no clue when that happened

This is fantastic. Is there a way to apply the cheats (IDKFA and IDDQD) by any chance? Fond memories of pretending to be sick so I could hijack my dad's computer to play doom.

Hmm, so all the game graphics are monochrome? They could use color, at least for the sprites (monsters, powerups, incoming fireballs etc.) to make them more easy to see. In Teletext the colors are set at character level, and there's only 8 of them, but at least that's something...

surely running doom on that teletext remote control should be the next goal? :)

Very cool project, surprised it's possible. Thanks for sharing the youtube vid on it too. (Perhaps the 3d view could use another shade of grey or two using the other colors or characters?)

Cool!

I think that image quality could be improved by using a suitable dithering algorithm, the current logic seems a bit simplistic. Could be a nice summer project for my highschooler…

Awesome. I'd love to see a telnet service where you can play this like the star wars asciimation project.

Where I'm from we call this graphics format "Mode 7"

Of course this is made by a ThinkPad user

Nice.