It Runs Doom!

A celebration of computer science's most violent Hello World substitute, It Runs Doom showcases all the systems that strange people have managed to get to run the popular 1993 action game Doom, among other members of the retro FPS canon.

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The Apple Pippin? Yeah, it runs Doom.

The Pippin was one of those many failures of '90s Apple before the iMac-led revival - a game console manufactured by Bandai running MacOS classic off of the game CD, with the aim of being a multimedia box like the wildly successful Phillips CD-i. It failed to reach those lofty heights and was snuffed with a terrifying immediacy with the return of Jobs and the end of the "Mac clones" program in 1997, just a year after launch.

This project hooks up a "fake mac-formatted" hard drive that the Pippin was able to recognize, allowing for the Mac port of Doom to be run.

Incidentally, the Mac port of Doom's source code leaked out the other day. Interesting stuff!

Thanks to DeathEgg for hipping me to this!

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Windows XP kernel drivers? Yeah, they run Doom. At this point, I'm too afraid to ask why.

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Teletext? It can’t run Doom per-se, but it can display it!

Play Doom in Teletext is a fascinating little bit of trickery that renders the display from an external Linux device through a Teletext display, aka that old TV menu thing your grandpa used to use to check the horse racing results. The custom hud/menu display is the icing on the cake!

Thanks to Lukas for creating and submitting this!

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A goddamned tractor? Yeah, it runs Doom.

Directly quoting iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens on Twitter, reporting live from DefCon 2022 in Las Vegas:

Sick Codes has jailbroken a John Deere, and this is just the beginning. Turns out our entire food system is built on outdated, unpatched Linux and Windows CE hardware with LTE modems.

John Deere has repeatedly told regulators that farmers can't be trusted to repair their own equipment. This foundational work will pave the path for farmers to retake control of the equipment that they own.

And yes, that is corn-themed Doom running on a John Deere touchscreen. sickcodes really went all out for this. You can harvest corn to raise your health or go hunt down the piggies!

Putting together a themed mod for your security-exploit demonstration is a whole new level from what we usually see. Kudos!

Thanks to Linguica for bringing this to my attention!

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This is clearly in full defiance of God, Satan, physics and basic memory protections.

Thanks to coolfrogdad for being the first on the drawer!

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Unless I can find evidence to otherwise (cannot rule this out), I am the first person ever to compile Doom to run on A/UX, Apple's abandoned UNIX operating system from the 68000 days.

~ Cariad K. on Twitter

More Info Here. A/UX? Yeah, it runs Doom.

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The Game Boy Advance? It almost ran Quake.

A tech demo by the great Randy Linden, whose name may be familiar to you, showing off some very advanced visuals for the hardware at a fairly decent clip. By the time the engine had been whipped into shape, though, the world had moved onto newer platforms, so Randy took what he had and turned it into an original game that continues to be updated to this day.

Bonus Trivia: The level designer for this tech demo was Wouter van Oortmerssen, later to become the creator of the Cube and Sauerbraten game engines!

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16,000 HTML checkboxes? Yeah, they render Doom.

Thanks for sharing, AlexMax!

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An Easter Egg has been found in the Saturn port of Doom, lurking under the surface for a full quarter-century. To quote discoverer MattFrie1:

Enter "jb4jh*****" for Rage Special Credits and "lyjvm*****" for Sega Special Credits at the password screen (The asterisks can be any value). After it flashes "invalid password" just press the start button to display the credits. Pretty sure this has remained undiscovered for all these years.

EDIT: Seems like this Easter egg is a bit more difficult to enable than just entering passwords. From what I have discovered so far the credits will only display after Map 02 (Plant) has been loaded into memory. Trying to use the passwords from any other map or from starting up the game after powering the system on will not trigger the hidden screens. I've also discovered that the last 5 characters of the password can be any character, just as long as the first 5 characters are the ones listed above.

Thanks to MattFrie1 for finding this!

EDIT: Updated with more accurate means of discovery.

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TempleOS? Yeah, it runs Doom.

If you don’t know the strange, sad story of this homebrewed, solo-effort operating system, well, uh, that’s well beyond the scope of this humble, barely-updated blog. I’d definitely recommend looking up the Down The Rabbit Hole episode, but be warned: It is extremely not an easy watch.

Anyway, it runs Chocolate Doom now.

Thanks to /u/TheRedstoneblock for the video footage.

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allegedly

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A Peloton? Yeah, it runs Doom.

I asked the person behind this photo about the no-doubt complex and intricate work that went into crowbarring Doom onto exercise equipment:

It's just an Android tablet.

Ah, well. That’d do it, then.

Thanks Illuminado for the pic!

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An edge computing service? Yeah, it runs Doom.

More from the “Just for Fun” files: An engineer at Fastly, an Edge Computing service, documents crowbarring Doom into Fastly’s Compute@Edge service, which, it turns out, was very unsuited to such a thing. 

In order to get the common code running on Compute@Edge, I had to refactor the traditional game loop that DOOM employed. A typical game will initialize and then run in an endless loop, doing an input->simulation->output tick over and over at the desired frequency, taking inputs from the local input devices such as a keyboard, mouse, or controller, and outputting video and audio. On Compute@Edge, however, a process like this will eventually be evicted by the platform, since the intent is for the instance to start up, do some work, and then return to the caller. I thus removed the loop entirely and changed the instance to only run a single frame of the game.

Workarounds ensure!

Thanks Linguica for bringing this to my attention!

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Smart TVs? Yeah, they briefly ran Doom behind closed doors.

More firmware fun, courtesy of Jaewon Choi:

Back in 2008, I was working on a firmware development project for Samsung smart televisions. To overcome boredom, I ported Doom to the firmware and took this photo. The game could be played with IR remote controller. The PowerBook G4 shown below connected the television via serial over LAN.

I used to get a lot of asks about Smart TVs back when this account (and blogging service) was more active. I wonder if anyone’s press-ganged one of the Android ports onto a modern unit?

Thanks Jaewon for submitting!

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Your bootloader? Yeah, it runs Doom.

Freshly sent in by Ahmad over at Pengutronix: A port of Doom to Barebox, an open-source bootloader for embedded devices. Quoting the submission message:

I’ve since seen it running on a x86 Laptop under UEFI, on an ARM-powered tractor panel and even on a RISC-V emulator compiled to WebAssembly.

A porting guide has also been made available to aid others in the cause of making Doom run on heavy bare metal. Not the first time this has happened, oddly enough...

Thanks again to Ahmad for making, documenting and submitting this!

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A Karaoke Machine? Yeah, it runs Doom.

Exact details are hard to find, even before accounting for the language barrier, but this appears to be a TJ Taijin Media Ziller B80, a karaoke machine targeted at Korean karaoke parlors with a 1tb hard drive. No other information about the specs is available, but judging by Google translating the video description and comments, implementing the button inputs was actually fairly difficult...

Thanks to Antares031 for finding this!

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The iCE40 UltraPlus FPGA? Yeah, it runs Doom.

The efforts to elevate Doom from software to hardware continue. And this time, there’s a 22 minute video lecture on the process! Good stuff.

Thanks to Sylvain Munaut for submitting this!