Continuing his quest to put DOOM on literally everything that has a capable enough processor and a screen, [Aaron Christophel]’s most recent target is a Slate 7 Pro travel router. With a generous 2.8″ touch screen and a lot of onboard processing power to handle all the advertised networking and routing features via its WAN and (W)LAN interfaces, it should be able to run the game really quite well. As usual the main question is how to get the game to run on it first.

The port of choice is fbdoom, with instructions on how to run it on this router provided on the GitHub project page. The reason for the touch screen is so that you can see the status of interfaces and interact with it without having to open the web interface. Boringly, this router has an SSH daemon ready to connect to, giving you full root access to the Linux-based firmware.

It’s just your typical AArch64 ARM-based system, with the gl_screen process running for the touch screen display. From there it was easy enough to deduce the settings to jot into fbdoom so that it too could use the same screen and touch inputs. After copying the compiled binary with SCP over to the router, it can then be started like any application. With touch inputs somewhat awkwardly mapped to certain areas of the touch screen, it’d be nice to see the USB 2.0 port used for USB HID inputs, but it does show how easy things can be when it runs something like Linux and you got full root access.

Incidentally this also heavily blurs the lines between something like a Valve Steamdeck and a router, with the latter just missing some gamepad controls on the side to do some on-the-go gaming when you’re not using it for routing network traffic.