Playing Minecraft on a receipt printer: YouTuber reaches the Ender Dragon and goes viral
YouTuber smill says that Minecraft has lost some of its charm for him. He misses the early days when playing on low-end hardware made the game genuinely challenging. To recreate that feeling, he came up with an unexpected solution: playing Minecraft all the way to the Ender Dragon using a standard receipt printer as his display. His short video showcasing the project has already racked up more than 3.5 million views on YouTube.
Technically, the game still runs on a PC. A script or custom-built app converts the visuals to grayscale and sends a continuous stream of screenshots to the printer. This setup renders the game at only 0.5 to 1 frame per second. To keep things tidy, the YouTuber even built a makeshift paper roller out of K'NEX pieces to stop the printouts from piling up all over the room.
From a gameplay perspective, the project is a genuine challenge. There’s about a two-second delay, and the visuals are reduced to rough outlines, with the inventory often appearing as a solid black blur. Even so, smill managed to complete Minecraft all the way to the Ender Dragon, guided by well-known speedrunners Johnny A. and Fulham. The community has praised the project for its creativity, though some viewers have reacted with irony or skepticism. And because the game was turned into a physical experience, it’s difficult to fully verify that every part of the run was truly played using the receipt printer.
Source(s)
Smillgames via YouTube
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