Oscillscopes Rule - Hi Defs Drool
In discussions on early video games, 1958's "Tennis for Two" should come up. A simple tennis like game, built on a computer made for military work, it was basically batting a ballistic missile back and forth. Kinda like Pong meets Missile Command? Created by Higinbotham to amuse visitors to the Brookhaven lab, which I think was run by the Atomic Energy Commission then, it was a simple game and was only operational for a short time. It was recreated a few years ago. Oh yes, it was on an oscilloscope...y'know, what you think of for testing signals, like a heart beat. Its really just a footnote to video game history, as it never had any real impact. Just a blip on the screen, you might say....
I'm no engineer, but when I think of vector graphics like Asteroids or the Vectrex, I think of those vector monitors as being large scale oscilloscopes. Perhaps someone can explain the differences. Yet by about 1985, oscilloscopes or their larger cousins were kaput.
By then oscilloscopes proper though seemed archaic...no, they *were* archaic. Add another 20 years to archaic and you get what, megalithic? So ancient that doing a video game on one goes beyond old skool to either bizarre, ridiculous or downright awesome.
So this Pekka Vaanagen gets a version of Quake running on his oscilloscope for the giggles.
Quake on an oscilloscope.
http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/oscilloscope_quake.html
You can follow the link on his page to youtube clips of others doing things on scopes. Who knew this was even a thing? In 2014, they are making like the Outer Limits control voice doing zeerust retrofuture stuff on oscilloscopes.
I know the community here is collector and action oriented, not into digital whittling stuff like minecraft, but this is another part of our hobby I never even knew about. Scratch that...maybe not our hobby, but a point where one hobby meets another, since playing Quake was not the main goal really, but rather doing something awesome (which playing quake is) on a vintage analog scope. Its like MacGyver meets video gaming or something. Or some deleted scene from a Connery Bond film, where the high tech villain has Bond playing it for some sort of death trap.