Beating Minecraft on a Restaurant Receipt Printer
Every now and then the urge to reinstall Minecraft hits like a creeper in the dark. But while most of us just boot it up on our regular gaming PC, one YouTuber decided that was a little too normal.
Creator smillgames set out to play Minecraft using a restaurant style receipt printer as his display. Yes, the same kind of thermal printer that normally spits out orders in the kitchen. Instead of pixels on a monitor, his world was rendered as a never ending strip of tiny black and white blocks on paper.
This stunt is not about running Minecraft directly on the printer hardware itself. The game still runs on a regular computer. The twist is that the printer is used like a bizarre kind of monitor that constantly prints new frames of the game as he plays. Think of it as live gameplay screenshots on a roll.
Smillgames shared short previews of the setup on social media, teasing what he called possibly the dumbest thing he has ever done. Watching it in action is surprisingly hypnotic. The printer chatters away as it feeds out frame after frame of Minecraft gameplay, each one a low resolution snapshot of whatever is happening on screen at that moment.
How It Works and Why It Is So Ridiculous
Unlike the classic trend of getting Doom to run on almost anything, from a vape to inside Doom itself, this project focuses on output rather than processing. The computer still does the heavy lifting. The printer just shows what is going on.
In practical terms, the system grabs the game image and converts it to a super low resolution black and white frame that the receipt printer can understand. That frame is then printed as fast as the hardware allows. Each fresh line of paper becomes a new view into the Minecraft world. The end result is something like a flipbook made of hundreds or thousands of tiny screenshots.
The frame rate is obviously terrible. The printer can only push out so many lines per second, so the gameplay looks choppy and delayed compared to a normal screen. The article even jokes that the experience looks similar to the sort of low frame rate people used to suffer through when running demanding games like Oblivion on under powered PCs years ago.
There is also the problem of waste. Every frame costs paper. Every movement, jump and swing turns into more thermal paper rolling out across the desk or the floor. A commenter pointed out that there was a lot of empty white space between printed frames that could have been reduced. Smillgames jokingly replied that he just loves deforestation, leaning into the absurdity of burning through rolls of paper to play a video game he could have simply enjoyed on a normal monitor.
Not all of the output ended up in the trash though. After finishing the challenge, smillgames put together a framed collage of key moments from the run, including the moment he officially beat Minecraft using the printer display. The frame acts as a physical trophy and proof that he actually completed the game with this bizarre setup.
Why These Hardware Stunts Keep Gamers Hooked
Stuff like this sits in a strangely fun corner of gaming culture, where performance and practicality do not really matter. Instead, the focus is on the question: can it be done at all.
Over the years we have seen games controlled or displayed using just about anything people can wire up. There have been bananas used as Overwatch controllers, games wired to kitchen appliances, and the long running meme of getting Doom to run on ever simpler devices. Playing on a receipt printer fits right into this tradition of pushing hardware in ridiculous and creative ways.
From a PC and hardware perspective, these projects highlight a few interesting ideas:
- How flexible modern PCs and software are when it comes to routing input and output
- How low the actual requirements of some games can be if you strip down resolution and color
- How much of our normal experience of a game depends on basic things like refresh rate, color depth and responsiveness
Watching Minecraft on a thermal printer makes you realize just how much information we normally take for granted. Color, lighting, smooth camera panning and sharp textures vanish. What is left is a raw, blocky outline of the world that the brain can still recognize as Minecraft, even though it has been crushed down to black and white lines.
The article ends with a bit of nostalgia and a hint of concern that we might be running out of truly surprising ways to play games. When you have already seen people using fruit, toasters and now restaurant printers as gaming gear, it takes a lot to deliver that same sense of shock again. Still, as long as there are curious tinkerers and gamers with too much time and hardware on their hands, the next strange PC or console experiment is probably just around the corner.
For most of us, Minecraft will stay on our usual monitors at sensible frame rates. But knowing someone out there has rolled the credits while playing through a printer makes booting up a regular world feel almost luxurious. Sometimes PC gaming is about ultra high performance rigs and cutting edge GPUs. Other times it is about seeing just how silly and low tech you can go and still claim you beat the game.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/survival-crafting/step-aside-doom-mad-lad-plays-minecraft-using-a-receipt-printer-for-reasons-known-only-to-him-and-god/
