This is one of those projects where the implementation is more interesting than the meme. Rendering DOOM isn’t the impressive part, hijacking a PCB editor’s rendering pipeline and making it behave like a real-time vector engine is.
The part I love most is how many unrelated systems had to cooperate:
extracting geometry directly from DOOM’s drawsegs/vissprite internals
mapping sprite classes to physical component footprints
running real-time updates through KiCad’s object model without triggering full recompute
and then running the same vector stream to an oscilloscope via audio DAC
That’s a really clever chain of “use the tool for something it was never designed to do.”
ScopeDoom might end up being the more interesting long-term direction, vector displays force you to think about rendering differently, and there’s something poetic about DOOM being rendered as literal analog voltage traces.
If you ever take it further, the combination of:
faster DAC (or multi-kHz arbitrary waveform generator)
true analog persistence phosphor scope
and dynamic sprite simplification
…could get you surprisingly close to a smooth vector-shooter aesthetic.
Either way: great hack. The world needs more playful abuse of serious tools.
The part I love most is how many unrelated systems had to cooperate:
extracting geometry directly from DOOM’s drawsegs/vissprite internals
mapping sprite classes to physical component footprints
running real-time updates through KiCad’s object model without triggering full recompute
and then running the same vector stream to an oscilloscope via audio DAC
That’s a really clever chain of “use the tool for something it was never designed to do.”
ScopeDoom might end up being the more interesting long-term direction, vector displays force you to think about rendering differently, and there’s something poetic about DOOM being rendered as literal analog voltage traces.
If you ever take it further, the combination of:
faster DAC (or multi-kHz arbitrary waveform generator)
true analog persistence phosphor scope
and dynamic sprite simplification
…could get you surprisingly close to a smooth vector-shooter aesthetic.
Either way: great hack. The world needs more playful abuse of serious tools.