Watch Doom and Super Mario Played On An Old Texas Instruments Calculator
It's fairly slow given the old processor on the TI-83 Plus, but it does work.
If you went to school in the 1990s, then you probably remember a pretty powerful calculator for its time from Texas Instruments. It was programmable and could do amazing things, especially in math class. There are quite a few of them still around, with some capable of running games such as Doom and Super Mario.
Lazy Game Reviews (via Motherboard) took a TI-83 Plus it found for $5 and proceeded to load the games onto the calculator using TI-Connect Graph Link software and games from ticalc.org. The site offers Doom, Tetris, Super Mario, and other popular old school games specifically for Texas Instruments calculators. And within a short time, the games are up and running. Don't expect much, given the 6 MHz microprocessor, but they are playable.
Intrepid gamers are always trying to get the popular FPS to run on whatever they can, given that id Software made the MSDOS-based code, released to the public in 1997, much easier to port to other platforms than its predecessor Wolfenstein. A site called It Runs Doom! has managed to get the game running on a toaster, an ATM and even a digital camera.
So enjoy a bit of nostalgia on a calculator.
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John Keefer posted a new article, Watch Doom and Super Mario Played On An Old Texas Instruments Calculator