Watch a Minecraft speedrun with a big difference - it's played using a printer as a monitor

It's becoming more challenging to find something new in the world of experimental gaming - also known as 'playing Doom on an insert-improbable-device-here' - but this is definitely a striking new first: playing Minecraft on a printer.

A receipt printer to be precise, and YouTuber Smill managed to pull this off, as Tom's Hardware flagged up.

The YouTuber beat Minecraft with a speedrun that took up less time than needed for the printer to churn through the five rolls of receipt paper that was all he had to hand. You can see the run in the video above (which has some colorful language and jokes - be warned).

How does this setup work exactly? Smill wrote an app to pipe images to the printer, and then implemented a timer to send screenshots of the game automatically to the printer at something approaching a frame a second (around 0.7 FPS apparently). Trying to go faster than that meant that the printer overheated (and you can't really see it speeding past anyway).

The end result is basically a flipbook version of Minecraft, and with a blocky resolution and monochromatic output on the paper, it's punishingly tricky to tell what's going on - especially when trying to work with the inventory, for example.

So, it's pretty impressive to see the YouTuber managed to come out victorious, just about - with less than a minute's worth of paper to spare when the Ender Dragon is felled and the credits roll.

That's cutting it close to say the least, and speaking of cutting, Smill does acknowledge that this isn't exactly the most tree-friendly way to play Minecraft.

You'll be going through a lot of paper rolls in a weekend's worth of gaming, naturally, making it not only one of the most novel video gaming experiments ever seen, but also one of the least eco-friendly.