eli5 How are people playing Doom on so many different (and usually very old) devices? A notepad, pregnancy test, how tf?

Question

Like how tf does one play Doom on a pregnancy test???????

In: 647

Answer 1

Putting aside the fact that some of these are kind of faked (like the pregnancy test and note) by just using them as a display with Doom running on something else, Doom can run on a lot of tiny embedded modern hardware because it was designed to run on (now ancient) 33mhz 486 CPUs in the 90s.

Just taking that smart lightbulb that can run Doom as an example, the lightbulb has a 40mhz ARM CPU in it to handle the wifi and http connectivity it uses to connect to its app. That tiny ARM chip is more powerful than the 486 processors of 30 years ago.