DOOM Ported To A $30 Clamp Meter

DOOM. Boil it, mash it, stick it in a stew, it’s the game that runs on anything and everything. Now, the classic shooter is running on a rather unlikely target—a cheap clamp meter of very limited resources, thanks to the work of [Artur Bieniek].

The clamp meter in question is the FNIRSI DMC-100, which can be had for the low price of just $30 or so if you know where to look. It’s a far cry from the many thousands of dollars you’d pay for a heavy old 486-based machine back in 1993. [Artur] got the doomgeneric engine running on the Artery AT32F415 chip that runs the clamp meter.

The chip is pretty capable, with its 150 MHz clock speed, though the 32 KB of RAM posed rather a big limitation to the project. It may be one of the lowest RAM DOOM ports out there. Even with this limit, [Artur] was able to get Episode 1 of Freedoom: Phase 1 loaded on to the thing, including E1M1 to E1M9 along with the title screen, intermissions, the finale, the menu, and four save slots. Color graphics are displayed on the meter’s 320 x 240 screen, and there are even sound effects on the built-in buzzer. Controls are mapped to the rather curious choice of a DJI RC-N1 drone controller.

We’ve seen DOOM running on everything from desk phones to completely custom CPUs. These days you have to try pretty hard to find something it hasn’t already been ported to.

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