Retro Coding Fun: Interactive Games on Your Printer with PostScript
summary
PostScript is a compact Turing-complete language that runs live on real printers; the talk demos a chess engine and a tic-tac-toe game that actually execute on hardware using netcat and shell piping and run under the interpreter gocript. Chess AI uses piece-square tables and a minimax-style evaluation, tic-tac-toe does win/block/random moves, a Brainfuck interpreter proves Turing-completeness, Sokoban and Tetris fit in ~600–700 lines, high scores persist via printer filesystem, and a tiny raytracer shrinks from 760 to 727 bytes.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Retro coding with PostScript
- 3:59What is PostScript
- 8:37First PostScript examples
- 13:21PostScript capabilities
- 15:29Printer games feasibility
- 19:04Chess implementation
- 23:47Desktop games in PostScript
- 31:54Tetris mechanics
- 34:24File system security
- 36:33Takeaways and constraints
- 37:59Polyglot PostScript demos
- 40:11Q&A
