OP question was actually plausible, as Quake and other open-sourced ID Software games have a long history of being ported / rendered to all kinds of exotic devices by the modding community: terminals [1], oscilloscopes [2], and many others. [1] [link] [2] [this video]
Quake rendered on an oscilloscope as an exotic port
I like this guy. I thought this was going to be a more introductory video: [link] (holy c *, he published a lot of these since 2014, they're pretty good :) ) This has been done with quake: [this video]
> to extract vector data directly from the engine That got me thinking “I wonder if anyone has done this on an oscilloscope” and oddly I can't fine anyone who quite has. That DOOM objects are sprites and not actual 3D objects would limit the fidelity, but the scenery could be rendered at least. There are several examples of managing to use a high-speed scope as a low-res monochrome raster device (scanning like a CRT monitor does and turning the beam on & off as needed). I did find an example of Quake being done on a scope the way I was imagining: [this video] - as all objects are actual 3D models in Quake that even manages to give them some presence & shape. EDIT: then I read the second half of this post and saw ScopeDoom! I'm surprised there are no earlier examples that are easy to find.
Quake rendered on a scope with 3D models showing shape
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
4 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more