Old desk phones are fairly useless these days unless you’re building a corporate PBX in your house. However, they can be fun to hack on, as [0x19] demonstrates by porting DOOM to a Snom 360 office phone.
The Snom 360 is a device from the early VoIP era, with [ox19] laying their hands on some examples from 2005. The initial plan was just to do some telephony with Asterisk, but [ox19] soon realized more was possible. Digging into a firmware image revealed the device ran a Linux kernel on a MIPS chip, so the way forward became obvious.
They set about hacking the phone to run DOOM on its ancient single-color LCD. Doing so was no mean feat. It required compilation of custom firmware, pulling over a better version of BusyBox, and reworking doomgeneric to run on this oddball platform. It also required figuring out how the keyboard was read and the screen was driven to write custom drivers—not at all trivial things on a bespoke phone platform. With all that done, though, [0x19] had a dodgy version of DOOM running slowly on a desk phone on a barely-legible LCD display.
Porting DOOM is generally a task done more for the technical thrill than to actually play the game on terribly limited hardware. We love seeing it done, whether the game is ported to a LEGO brick or a pair of earbuds. If you’re doing your own silly port, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline—just make sure it’s one we haven’t seen before.
