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The humble thermal printer has been around for decades, and we usually see it in action while grocery shopping.With the help of our favorite SBC Raspberry Pi, we can turn this simple printer into something more fantastic.For creative creators, the possibilities seem endless, as shown by Reddit user Irrer Polterer, who is using a thermal printer to power this YouTube chat-driven version of Zork.
If you haven’t heard of Zork before, it’s a text-based adventure game that takes place in a fictional world.The game was first released in the late 1970s and quickly became known for its support for complex commands and a recognized vocabulary.The DEC PDP-10 mainframe computer was originally developed (the computer was the size of a room at the time).Zork has been ported to many machines, but we can guarantee that the original developers never thought of YouTube and thermal printers.
Users interact with the game by entering commands in a live YouTube chat.A camera is fixed to the thermal printer so the user can see the action in real time.Irrer Polterer created a custom script for the Raspberry Pi that listens for input from a YouTube chat and parses it into an emulator running Zork.Check out the original live recording to see what the setup looks like in action.
To recreate this project, you will need a Raspberry Pi.It doesn’t take a lot of processing power to drive a thermal printer, but if you’re running Zork and scanning YouTube chats at the same time, it doesn’t hurt to use a model with more RAM like the Pi 4.However, a Pi Zero can drive a thermal printer and should work too, but ultimately depends on the complexity of the project.
According to Irrer Polterer, the code that runs on the Pi is written in Python.It constantly listens for commands from YouTube chats and sends them to Frotz, a Z-Machine emulator for running Zork.After the game processes the commands, the Pi processes the results and transmits them to a thermal printer for printing.
If you’re interested in making this Raspberry Pi project or developing something similar, you’re in luck.Irrer Polterer shared numerous details about the project’s interoperability, along with the source code, on GitHub.Another Zork live broadcast is also planned for users.Be sure to follow the Irrer Polterer for more updates and future streamables.
Ash Hill is a freelance news and feature writer for Tom’s Hardware US.She manages the Pi project for the month and most of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting.
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Post time: Mar-29-2022