Doom can be run on anything
Fans of retro games don't let their favorite games die by making modifications or porting them to modern versions of consoles and software. And the cult game stands apart here
1993, which began to be launched not only on PCs and consoles, but on any device that has a screen and a processor. And it became a kind of meme. Game created on the engine
was designed so that only the most modest settings were required to play.
Over the years since Doom's release, many technologies have evolved. In 2007, a revolution began when Apple released its first iPhone, and soon displays became an integral part of the 21st century, being integrated into more and more products and everyday tools: refrigerators, toasters, cash registers, cars, e-cigarettes and even pregnancy tests. Along with this, it became possible to run Doom on all these devices. Thus, the concept of “Doom running on everything” (DROE) was born, spawning a culture in which Doom was played on ATMs, calculators, LEGO bricks, potatoes, and even the aforementioned pregnancy tests.
Doom, of course, won't run best on, say, an LED billboard or a Playdate console, but that doesn't matter. Within the DROE culture, simply displaying a game on the screen of a particular device is considered success.
Let's wait for more stories about how enthusiasts run Doom using improvised things to deal with the demons of hell. In the meantime, here are some amazing examples of how the legendary Doom is running on various devices.
❯ Origin
Doom was designed to be highly portable from the start, weighing in at just 2.39MB. Today, the average web page size is 3.5 MB. As computing power has increased dramatically since 1993, so has the number of devices that can run a game. It's also still a lot of fun to play.
To achieve the 3D effect, Doom was programmed very efficiently. Doom uses very few CPU cycles. The engine itself is not technically 3D – limited calculations are performed on the Z axis. Data is packaged very efficiently into WAD files. Doom has its own memory manager. All this means is that the system doesn't have to be very powerful compared to today's technology to run Doom.
id Software released Doom's source code in 1997—just four years after the game's debut—making it easier to access and recompile. Developers regularly state that the Doom engine is well-coordinated and organized, which makes porting the game much easier. id Software originally released code for the Linux version. Almost immediately people began porting the game back to DOS, hence the term “source port”. This eventually led to many code forks into different source ports such as ZDoom and Chocolate Doom. This means that there are always people working with the Doom code and keeping it up to date. The one thing all of these ports have in common is that they can use the original Doom assets.
Doom Code in C
The game is written in the C programming language, and most platforms today have access to a C compiler. The C programming language has a long history dating back to the 70s. The most important thing about C when it came out was that it was “portable”. As long as there is a compiler for the platform, porting a program to C is much easier than porting something like assembly code. And because C is an old language, there are compilers for every platform imaginable. Languages like C++ and Objective C are also backwards compatible, providing more features. Additionally, languages like Java allow you to include C code via a shell (which is how most Android ports are created).
❯ Spreading
At one time, Doom was the king of free-to-play games. Shareware games were similar to demo versions. In the case of Doom and many others, the first third of the game was free, and you had to pay for the full game. This means that to this day people can get a piece of Doom for free.
On December 1, 2006, YouTuber Stephen English uploaded video recording Doom games on an oscilloscope.
On August 12, 2006, YouTuber KevlarGorilla posted
in which he plays Doom on the Nintendo DS.
On April 8, 2006, YouTuber bogaut posted footage of Doom running on an iPod.
On March 24, 2009, YouTuber yerzmyey published
game running on an 8-bit ZX Spectrum personal computer.
On February 16, 2011, YouTuber DJ Omnimaga uploaded
graphing calculator that launched Doom.
On October 16, 2013, the blog “
” on Tumblr, which features images and videos of the Doom game being played on various electronic devices. Since then, “It Runs Doom” has been considered a meme.
On August 10, 2014, YouTuber Aussie50 posted videoin which he plays Doom on an ATM.
July 16, 2015 YouTuber TheZombieKiller
on which Doom runs inside a virtual arcade machine in the game port
. The best way to get rid of the boredom of killing demons in Doom is to take a break and kill demons in Doom. A mod for the popular GZDoom port runs a basic copy of Doom within the game itself using a tool called
, which allows you to create complex interactive environments and objects based on player actions. It's only a matter of time before you can play Doom in Doom in Doom. TheZombieKiller also launched Wolfenstein in Doom.
May 8, 2016 technology blog Vice Motherboard
with a list of different devices that can run Doom. In 2016, DROE culture really took off.
On November 20, 2016, YouTuber diffractive posted video, which plays Doom on the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar. Within a month, the video received more than 1.4 million views and 400 comments.
❯ Evolution
Reddit user,
, created a Minecraft mod in which you can create computers that act as virtual machines. In the video about the mod, you can see the player testing programs such as Paint and, of course, Doom on computers. This essentially creates a game within a game. It should not be confused with the Minecraft mod, which creates a completely new Doom adventure map into Minecraft gameplay.
A researcher named Viktor Tóth conducted
, to see if he could teach a rat to run down a straight corridor in Doom using a VR rig. In the experiment, a rat runs around a sphere that controls the character's movement. He also experimented with training a rat to shoot at enemies.
During
2023 IEEE International Conference on Solid State Circuits in San Francisco
company
the manufacturer of the NDP200 chip, demonstrated how the chip was trained to play
. The latter is a stripped-down and lightweight version of Doom, which is often used in AI research and reinforcement learning.
The level shown is called “Defend the Circle” and is a round room in which enemies constantly appear, which immediately disappear after being killed (so there is no death animation). The NDP200 was trained on a neural network consisting of several layers so that the chip's 640 kilobytes of onboard memory could identify, target and shoot demons from hell.
The NDP200 is an ultra-low power chip. It's designed to essentially monitor video through neural networks, consuming virtually no power, and when it spots a person walking by, for example, it wakes up more powerful systems to do the “real” monitoring. Artificial intelligence specialists, of course, decided to demonstrate its capabilities by teaching it to play Doom.
Reddit user, Wojtek-Graj, was able to create a version of Doom that can be played using only sound. There wasn't much to see, so the developer connected a spectrogram to visualize the sound.
Wotjek-Graj has uploaded the source code for this port
as well as full instructions on how to set up.
Tweet2Doom is a Twitter bot that lets you play classic first-person shooter games using commands sent via Twitter. These commands are sent to the bot and a video is sent to the user showing what happened, after which they can continue sending more commands and progressing through the levels. A complete list of commands and the order in which they work can be found in the account's pinned tweet.
It's far from the most elegant or useful port of Doom, but it's another step in humanity's journey to make Doom playable on anything ever created.
And they've already sped up the first, iconic Doom level. One user used just two tweets to beat E1M1 in 11 seconds or less than 500 frames of gameplay.
Thanks to its simplistic design, Doom has even made its way into blockchain networks through updates to the Bitcoin and Dogecoin networks. After the launch of the NFT-like protocol Ordinalsa Bitcoin enthusiast added a simplified clone of Doom to the blockchain.
MIT PhD student in bioengineering
launched Doom on intestinal bacteria
. The screen is a 1-bit monochrome display measuring 32×48, filled with fluorescent protein in which bacteria live
, with each of them acting as a separate pixel. And it is on this very low-resolution display that you can visualize Doom gameplay. However, the cells take a very long time to light up properly: 70 minutes to illuminate the image, and then another eight hours and 20 minutes to go dark so the image can be reset for the next frame. This means that the bacterial display takes about eight and a half hours to load one frame. It would take approximately 600 years to complete a Doom game using gut bacteria cells. But theoretically it is possible.
❯ Immortality of Doom
This is just a small sample of all the wild devices you can play Doom on. No doubt there will be even crazier gadgets capable of playing Doom in the coming years, even if it will admittedly be hard to top bacteria.
Fans will always find new ways to honor their favorite franchises. So you can expect the list of weird devices playing Doom to only grow.
A reboot of the series may take the franchise in a new direction, but the original Doom is still very relevant in its own right. And in twenty years, someone will write an article explaining that every device in the IoT can now run an ancient 2016 remake of Doom that isn't even in immersive VR.
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