There are normal ways to play Quake. Pekka Väänänen chose to make a Hitachi V-422 oscilloscope display it through an audio connection.
Read “Quake on an oscilloscope: A technical report”
The 2014 write-up is exactly what a good personal technical page should be: not merely a video of a weird result, but a record of how the weird result worked and what went wrong along the way.
An oscilloscope in XY mode does not receive a conventional video frame. Two voltages control the horizontal and vertical position of the beam. Väänänen’s solution was therefore to reduce Quake‘s rendered scene to line geometry, convert the points into two audio channels, and let the left and right voltages steer the beam.
That sounds simple right up until the details arrive.
Lines need to be drawn at reasonably constant speed or their brightness changes. Geometry has to be culled aggressively because an oscilloscope cannot sensibly redraw every polygon in a Quake level. Traversal order matters because jumping from one unrelated line to another produces unwanted connecting streaks. The signal needs enough sample rate to draw a useful number of points before persistence fades.
Väänänen started with an XY oscilloscope simulator in Processing, then modified the DarkPlaces Quake source. The final system used audio output at high sample rates, line interpolation, view-frustum and back-face culling, and other compromises to turn a textured 3D game into a glowing wireframe display.
The page includes recordings and implementation details instead of hiding the trick behind a finished demo.
The explanation is better than the stunt
The video is the part people remember. The article is the part worth preserving.
A short viral clip could show Quake running on an oscilloscope and leave every interesting question unanswered. Väänänen documented the signal model, the renderer changes, practical limitations, test tools, and later updates. A technically curious reader can follow the path from “would this work?” to an actual implementation.
This is a later Web artifact than many Ancient Web entries, but it belongs to the same independent publishing tradition: one person builds something unreasonable, writes down the engineering, hosts the files, and leaves the page available long after social posts about the project would have vanished down a feed.
For programmers, the page is also a nice example of constraints producing clarity. Strip away textures, framebuffers and modern displays, and the problem becomes brutally physical: where should the electron beam be next?
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes technical pages like this because obscure experiments often contain better engineering explanations than the polished summaries that later reference them.
Somebody made Quake output voltages until an oscilloscope became a monitor.
The least we can do is keep the notes.