Like how tf does one play Doom on a pregnancy test???????
In: 647
Because Doom’s code was made open-source. In the gaming world, this is historically rare, few games legally release their source-code to the public. Because of this it means that anybody can both legally and easily port the game to w/e they want. Doom also came out at a time where computers were so primitive, that even the cheapest electronic devices today are more powerful than the average desktop PC form the early 90s was. Put those two things together and bam, Doom runs on smart fridges.
I realize this has nothing to do with your question, but speaking of Doom and various devices always reminds me of this [legendary video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI7tWd7B3iI).
Lol my kid asked for a Texas Instruments calculator for Christmas when he was 11 for this reason.
A few things.
1. The source code is available and has been ported to a lot of architectures.
2. The source has also been modified to run with fewer resources. Not that it ever needed a lot to begin with in today’s standards.
3. Modern embedded microcontrollers are getting quite powerful for their very low cost. When some manufacturer needs a display for their smart toaster or whatever, they aren’t going full custom or anything. They are grabbing one of those cheap-enough microprocessors and writing their interface code for that. It doesn’t NEED as much processing power as it has, but the parts are cheap and the development is easier and faster.
4. Like the other comments mentioned, a lot of those are “fake” (exaggerated / misrepresented really). Sometimes it’s a hardware swap. Sometimes the hardware is just a display for prerecorded gameplay.
Doom in Notepad: another application is rendering the video output as text and pasting frames into notepad.
Doom on Oscilloscope: same thing, but the output is rendered in XY analog signal as an audio output. It’s played back into an Oscilloscope in XY mode.
Here is the answer from one of the authors of the game, John Romero, talking about how this started, some technical details for what allows it to run everywhere, and why running it on an ATM, piano and pregnancy test is not that exciting (these are modern chips that can do a lot), while running it on a really old computer is much more interesting.
Another factor that hasn’t been brought up is a lot of smart devices are just running android under the hood and Doom already has many ports for android thanks to the source code being available. I remember the itrunsdoom blog talking about somebody running doom on a peloton and when they asked him how he did it his response was, “It’s just an android tablet.” At that point the most difficult part is probably just getting the device to let you install third party apk’s.
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.
Installing Doom on a device with a processor and display, is the hacker community announcement that the device has been hacked. Doom is typically used because it doesn’t require much processor or RAM. The game Doom is simple, recognizable, works on Windows, Linux, and Mac, old machines and new alike. They could do Oregon Trail, or other similar game, but Doom, while not the first 3D game, was the first 3D game to achieve widespread popularity.
Installing Doom is the hardware hacker equivalent of building a hotrod in your garage. It’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house. It’s like writing the definitive book on the device. Once a device can run Doom, it can pretty much run anything, take input, and display output.
Although the pregnancy test thing is just a wannabe. They disrespect the community.
Most of the time it’s less “playing doom” on the actual device, and more “hijacking the display” to output a computer playing doom.
The DOOM program is written in C. C code can run on basically anything, and most of the code doesn’t care what kind of device it’s on. DOOM’s code is also publicly available, so programmers can download and edit it if they need to.
So, all you need to do, is write logic to read the buttons and control the display, and then figure out how to get that code into the device. And, if the device has enough RAM and CPU, DOOM will run fine.
And, DOOM is old (released in 1993).
Computers have become so much cheaper since then, that what was a supercomputer in the 1970s, high-end workstation in the 1980s or game console in the 1990s, is the bottom of the barrel by the 2000s, and so cheap by the 2010s, that trying to use anything less powerful is a waste of engineering.
In 1993, the average home computer was just barely, maybe capable of running DOOM. So, the game was written to use as little of the computer as it can get away with. If your computer has power to spare, DOOM can use it, but it’s not a requirement.
So, there are a lot of computers that have the power to run DOOM just fine.
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