The 10 Most Absurd Places That People Ran Doom

Doom. Released in 1993 by id Software for MS-DOS, it was, alongside Duke Nukem, one of the most influential games of all time, showing how to make a good FPS game and how computers could be a place for games full of violence, blood, and exploding heads without the censorship of major developers like SEGA and Nintendo. It was so successful that it even got versions for those companies' consoles and countless sequels to this day by Bethesda, with Doom: The Dark Ages.

An unnamed marine is sent to Mars, to the colonies on the moons Phobos and Deimos, after a fight with a superior officer. There, an experiment with a teleportation system ends up opening a portal straight to hell. Demons invade the bases, and now it's up to you to stop the invasion, protect Earth, and take down the monsters that massacred your entire team.

Thanks to its simple and easily ported code, the original Doom is capable of running on virtually anything with a screen and a processor. This has even become a running joke among skilled programmers who put the game on the most unexpected hardware. Still doubtful? Then let us tell you about 10 places that can run Doom you never imagined.

Congratulations, Dad! You're a Doom Slayer. One of the first strange places someone ran Doom was by Foone Turing in 2020, who disassembled a digital pregnancy test and replaced the board with a more powerful microcontroller and a small OLED display.

In this way, he managed to transform the test into a simple terminal: with a Bluetooth keyboard, minimal processing power, and a monochrome screen. Since the screen had a very low resolution, the hacker used dithering techniques (a technique that alternates points or pixels to simulate more colors or levels of detail) to distinguish walls, enemies, and weapons on the 320x200 screen of the test display.

This idea showed that: if you have a processor and a screen, then you can run Doom. This ended up generating all the other attempts to run Doom in an absurd place that we’ll see from now on.

The class must’ve been really boring that day! So much so that the Omnimaga community, a group of programmers who meet in online forums dedicated to running games on calculators, decided to take TI calculators, manufactured by Texas Instruments, and create ports of Doom that run on models like the TI-83+, TI-84+, and TI-Nspire.

Despite slow CPUs and monochrome screens, with some optimizations, they manage to generate a few frames per second. To work, you need to load the game's WAD file into the calculator's memory and use the keys as controls. Now, when class is boring, just open Doom on the calculator and kill demons while your teacher explains something that may or may not be important. You'll find out later, when you get your friend's notes since they don't have the game on their calculator.

This isn't a case of eating the devil’s bread, but rather eating the rice the Doom Slayer cooked. A programmer, Aaron Christophel, was probably more inspired than hungry and got Doom running on his electric pressure cooker with a touchscreen.

The electric cooker model was a Krups Cook4Me. According to reports, the technique involved "understanding how the interface firmware works: extracting the firmware image via SWD (a debugging interface used to directly access, read, and reprogram microcontroller firmware), understanding which part of the display was separate from the board that controls the cooker's heating, and reprogramming only the touchscreen layer with a 'wrapper' (an interface code) that would run the game in a touch window."

The part that cooks the food remained intact, since the part that controls the cooking functions was on a separate board. He probably burned a lot of food while playing and didn't realize it was already done.

Here, the project was more of an engineering experiment and addiction to Mojang's game than anything else. Using redstone, repeaters, and other in-game resources, engineer ModPunchtree managed to create a minicomputer within Minecraft and run Doom on it. It wasn't exactly running the original game within the simulator, but rather recreating it with squares and blocks to generate the frames.

According to him, no mods or other external resources were used, only the things the game provides and a texture pack to create the computer called IRIS. It took a few seconds for the blocks to generate the Doom frames, and only the first level was remade and the sprites were recreated manually, but even so, it's quite an impressive feat.

This is a creation by a developer known as ading2210 who created DoomPDF.

According to the project description: “the C engine was compiled to asm.js with an older version of Emscripten and saved as a PDF that used the JavaScript engines of PDF readers. In this case, this modification only works well in browsers and readers compatible with Google's Chromium.

Instead of recreating the game screen in pixel-by-pixel text, the project uses one field per line and ASCII characters to generate grayscale, which generates about 12.5 frames per second. The controls are available as PDF fields, which creates a playable PDF, even if it runs at only 12 FPS. The project has been released on GitHub if you want to tinker with it or see how it works, but if you just want to play the Doom PDF you can access the official site provided by the developer.

Is your house unbearably hot? Maybe it's because you're running Doom on your thermostat. That's what GitHub user [cz7asm] did. He managed to run a modified version of the game, called Chocolate Doom, which aims to reproduce the original game experience and can be played on various types of devices. He used the thermostat's USB ports to connect a Super Nintendo controller and control the game.

Here, the point is less about an experiment and more about a warning. Other programmers had already used thermostats with ARM9 processors for similar experiments, but here the aim was to show how vulnerable and fragile the security of these devices is, demonstrating that physical ports can be used for things not intended by the manufacturer. If Doom runs on your equipment, you might need to be careful about what else you can run on it.

If you're going to run Doom from a PDF, why not print it out? That's what the YouTube channel Bringus Studios did. By modifying an Epson thermal printer, they printed each frame of the game running on a computer, and you could see what was printed to play. In the video, the game screen was next to the guy, but since it was just an experiment, it's still worth watching out of curiosity.

Each movement was printed, it took a few seconds for you to see what came out on the paper, and it consumed the thermal paper rolls in a short time, not to mention how much paper the game consumed (it's not just demons that the Doom Slayer kills here. He also kills a lot of trees!). Impractical to play like that, but quite interesting to watch.

Modern cars come with screens that allow you to view your GPS map, play music, and even watch movies, TV, and streaming services, so it's normal that they can run games. Not for the driver to play, but for the passengers. But it was based on this idea of ​​the driver playing games that the group of programmers used the discontinued MBUX Sound Drive system from Mercedes-Benz to integrate Doom with the car's steering wheel controls. This system allowed the driver to control "the music" with the steering wheel. For example, slowing down the car would make the music slower or mute the vocals, among other things.

Artists were invited to create compatible music; singer Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas even composed tracks for the system, but it was discontinued in 2019. It's unknown whether this was due to lack of adoption or safety concerns, but Mercedes described MBUX as a "fun experience".

But surely the most fun part was integrating Doom into this system. The paddle shifters on the steering wheel made the Doom Slayer walk around the environment. Imagine the traffic accidents if this wasn't just a joke by some programmers?

The GoPro Karma drone controller runs the Android system in some versions. This was enough for some programmers to unlock the bootloader, install a custom ROM of the operating system, and reprogram the controls so that the interface functioned like a tablet.

After adapting the firmware to work with touch controls, the device started running Doom. It functioned normally to run the game, but stopped controlling the drone. This shows what happens when manufacturers don't lock the recovery and bootloader in their systems. Not that this will work when someone is actually willing to run Doom in an unfamiliar environment.

Lose weight while slaying demons! Some exercise equipment with built-in Android systems can be modified (like the controller above) and have updates applied, file modifications installed, and, most importantly, emulators that run customized versions like Freedoom, a collaborative project to preserve the original game.

This time, the "victim" was a Life Fitness SE3 Elliptical, an exercise bike with a screen that displays information such as running time, distance traveled, and other things that aren't as fun as Doom. Modifying and installing the game allows you to play while pedaling or running. Now, imagine pedaling and playing? When you finish the run, you won't even feel your legs anymore.