Doom delivers five minutes of terminal violence on an IBM mainframe

Can an IBM Z mainframe run Doom? Of course it can. The more interesting question is whether you can play it through a text terminal without ruining your eyesight.

WND Software's browser demo connects to an IBM Z mainframe over SSH using its terminal emulator. Wojciech Graj's DOOM-ASCII supplies the text-based carnage, replacing conventional graphics with colored characters. There's no sound.

It is, however, completely playable (although you might need to recalibrate your vision to work out what is going on, particularly with regard to distant objects). Sessions are limited to five minutes, with room for up to 50 simultaneous users, but we had no trouble getting in. ASCII also presented no issues once the game was in motion. This writer played the original shareware release on an Amstrad ALT386SX portable, so squinting at an indistinct demon felt reassuringly familiar.

That Doom can be persuaded to run on an IBM Z mainframe is not particularly noteworthy. …