DOOM Ported To A Single LEGO Brick

By now you’ve all seen the tiny LEGO brick with a working screen in it. The work of one [James “Ancient” Brown], it was truly a masterpiece of miniaturization and creativity. Since then, [James] hasn’t stopped innovating. Now, he’s demoing a playable version of DOOM running on a single plastic brick.

We’ve covered the construction of these astounding screen bricks before. Long story short, [James] designed a tiny PCB that hosts an RP2040 microcontroller which is then hooked up to a tiny OLED screen. The components are placed in a silicone mold, which is then filled with transparent resin to form the brick. The screen is then powered via contacts in the bottom, much like older-style LEGO motors.

Early experiments involved running various graphics to emulate a spaceship dashboard, but [James] has now gone much further. He’s implemented RP2040-doom to run the game. It uses tilt controls thanks to an accelerometer, combined with capacitive touch controls for shooting. The monochrome OLED is driven very fast with a special library of [James’] own creation to create three levels of grayscale to make the game actually visible and (just barely) playable.

It’s a hack, of course, and the controls are far from perfect. Nobody’s speed-running E1M1 on [James’s] LEGO brick, to be sure. Perchance. With that said, it’s still a glorious piece of work nonetheless. Just imagine, sitting with friends, and announcing you’re going to play some DOOM — only to pluck a piece of LEGO out of your pocket and start blasting away at demons.

Just because [James] doesn’t know when to quit, we’re going to lay down the gauntlet. Let’s get network play happening on these things, yeah?
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Porting DOOM But In The Opposite Direction

DOOM was first released for MS-DOS, and is one of the pillar titles of the broader first-person-shooter genre. It’s also become a bit of a meme for being ported to any and every weird platform under the sun. Now, a group of developers in Costa Rica have found a way to flip that joke around – by porting an old mobile DOOM game back to the PC.

The game in question is DOOM RPG, made for BREW and Java-compatible phones in 2005. A group named GEC.inc has taken that game and ported it to Windows, outlining their work on the Doomworld forums. As with many such projects, the port is freely available, but doesn’t include the raw game files themselves due to copyright. You’ll have to find the gamedata yourself, and combine it with the files the group published on the forum to get it to work on a modern PC.

For those that have missed the turn-based role playing game based in the DOOM universe (Doomiverse?), today is a good day. No longer must you pine for your ancient, crusty Java smartphone of yesteryear. Now you can play the game on a less awful platform, and listen to the unique and compelling MIDI-esque soundtrack.

Doom ports are hot right now, whether it’s to forgotten Apple OSes or Sega arcade hardware. Video after the break.

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