Tech enthusiast gets Doom to run on a 40-year-old printer controller — ancient Agfa Compugraphic 9000PS came with a Motorola 68020 onboard for fast processing

A TechTuber with a fondness for older hardware has managed to get Doom to run on a 40-year-old print controller. Much of the video retelling this tale covers the work needed to add new firmware, plus display and audio out to the controller board. Once that hurdle was overcome, though, it doesn’t take long for Adrian’s Digital Basement to progress into some playful demos and, of course, get Doom up and running.

To be clear, the printer hardware here isn’t a typical old e-waste consumer device, it is actually the powerful Agfa Compugraphic 9000PS. This box would interpret the complex resolution-independent PostScript files sent to it by pre-press operators and change them into raster images that could be printed on the next piece of hardware down the chain, usually an imagesetter that produced high-resolution printing plates. That’s why the Agfa’s motherboard packed a powerful-for-the-era 68020 CPU. Interpreting and outputting work like this was computationally and resource-heavy.

This is the 4^th video from Adrian using the Agfa RIP, as the unassuming beige box holds numerous interesting components. For example, not only does the main PCB feature a 16 MHz 68020, the I/O controller board it is paired with packs its own 68000 CPU.

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A significant part of this latest adventure with the Agfa concerned reverse engineering the ROM code for the now ancient and obscure Agfa hardware. A significant step forward was made after replacing the Adobe PostScript interpreter in ROM with custom firmware based on AGFA-MON (available from GitHub) to establish a monitoring app, provide some OS boot stub options, and even add a BASIC interpreter to the system.

Before demos and the mighty Doom could run Adrian also needed to install the VERA 8-Bit Video Card, designed for homebrew computer projects like this.

After about 1hr 6mins into the video we finally get some demos shown running on the repurposed Agfa RIP. Adrian started with CP/M stuff, but quickly moved to a Unix OS (Minix). The full shareware version of Doom 1.9 was run via this OS “on what was just a printer freakin’ controller,” underlines the TechTuber.

But for those with experience of a 68020 (like an Amiga 1200), Doom is unsurprisingly a slow performer on this hardware. That isn’t the worst playability issue anyway, as the game wasn’t really controllable due to lack of PS/2-compatible keyboard support, noted Adrian. The terrible FPS reminds us of the recent 4FPS Red Dead Redemption 2 gaming shenanigans.

The TechTuber ends by reiterating what an astonishing transformation the Agfa RIP has been through, from redundant “trash” hardware of a bygone era to something that can provide retro computing fun (if not playable Doom).

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