doom

89 Articles

Running DOOM In A Keycap Takes Careful Work

August 9, 2023 by 4 Comments

Shoehorning DOOM into different hardware is a classic hacker’s exercise, and [TheKeebProject] managed to squeeze the 1993 classic into a custom keycap with the help of a Raspberry Pi RP2040, a custom PCB, and a clear resin enclosure. It even has a speaker for sound!

All processing is done inside the keycap, which is a clever feat. There is a USB connection, but it’s only for power and keyboard controls, so it’s completely playable without needing a whole lot of external support. The custom PCB and code are based off an earlier RP2040 DOOM project, and [TheKeebProject] has certainly made it their own by managing to get everything so tightly integrated. There’s a quick video mashup embedded below. There’s still a bit of work to do, but the code and design files are all on GitHub should you wish for a closer look.

Making DOOM physically smaller is a good challenge, but we’d like to remind fans that we’ve also seen DOOM shrink in terms of power consumption, all the way down to 1 mW.

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DOOM On IPhone OS, On Android

July 24, 2023 by 7 Comments

So you want to play some games from the early days of 32-bit iPhone OS that no longer run on recent OS versions? [Hikari-no-yume] wrote a sweet high-level emulator, touchHLE, to do so on modern iOS phones. But maybe you don’t have an iPhone? [Ciciplusplus] has your back. He ported the iPhone OS emulator, written in Rust, to Android, and then ported a version of DOOM that runs on iPhone OS to go with it.

[Ciciplusplus] also made a video (embedded below) where he documented the trials and tribulations of porting Rust code to the Android platform – an intensely Java environment. It doesn’t sound like it was at all trivial. Of course, this couldn’t have been accomplished without [Hikari-no-yume]’s original work on touchHLE, which was made essentially to fulfill [Hikari-no-yume]’s long-time obsession with the game Super Monkey Ball.

So for now, touchHLE can boast the ability to run a few old 32-bit games on Android and desktop operating systems. What other games from the first years of gaming on smart phones (and iPods) do you need to see ported? Get involved in the project if you’ve got an itch you need scratched.

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Pi Zero Runs DOOM Via Wireless Power

July 15, 2023 by 8 Comments

What’s better than a Raspberry Pi Zero running DOOM on a 3.5″ touchscreen? Running it over wireless power, of course!

[atomic14] has been interested in wireless power for a while, and while most of the hardware he’s tested over the years has been less than impressive, he demonstrates one that’s able to reliably deliver 5 V at about 1 A which is more than enough to boot a Raspberry Pi W2 into X and launch DOOM. But while that’s neat, he explains that wireless power isn’t quite yet an effortless solution.

The hardware can deliver 5 V at about 1 A wirelessly, which is plenty, but coil alignment is critical to efficiency.

For one thing, the hardware he’s using — similar to those used for mobile phone charging — need the receiver to be very close to the transmitter. In addition, they need to be aligned well or efficiency drops off sharply. For mobile phones this isn’t much of a problem, but it’s difficult to position a Raspberry Pi and display just so when one can’t see the coils. Misalignment means brownouts and other unreliable operation.

So while the wireless power is capable of running the Pi directly, [atomic14] attempts to put a small battery and charger circuit into the mix in order to make the whole thing both portable and more reliable. But because nothing is easy, he discovers that his charging board — which should be able to output as low as 4.5 V — isn’t able to be adjusted down any lower than 5.66 V. It turns out that a resistor marked 104 (which should be 100 kΩ) is actually measuring 57 kΩ, and the trim pot doesn’t go lower than 10 kΩ. The solution is a bit of component swapping, but we suppose it’s a reminder that sometimes with cheap parts, one pays in other ways.

You can see [atomic14]’s wireless power Raspberry Pi running the classic shooter in the video below. Wireless power may have its issues, but it’s certainly a lot less messy than running DOOM with a gigantic potato battery.

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Hyundai Is Doomed: Porting The 1993 Classic To A Hyundai Head Unit

June 11, 2023 by 6 Comments

In the natural order of the world, porting DOOM to any newly unlocked computing system is an absolute given. This a rule which [greenluigi1] understands all too well, leading to presumably the first Hyundai to be equipped with this all-time classic on its infotainment system. This follows hot on the trail of re-hacking said infotainment system and a gaggle of basic apps being developed for and run on said head unit (being the part of the infotainment system on the front dashboard). Although it is a Linux-based system, this doesn’t mean that you can just recompile DOOM for it, mostly because of the rather proprietary system environment.

To make life easy, [greenluigi1] picked doomgeneric as the version to port. The main selling point of this project is that it only requires the developer to implement five functions to support a new platform, which then ‘just’ left figuring out how to do this on a head unit. Two of these (DG_SleepMs() and DG_GetTicksMS()) could be copied verbatim from the X11/xlib port, but the remaining three required a bit of sleuthing.

Where things go sideways is with keeping the head unit’s Helix window manager happy, and stick to the limited ways a GUI application can be launched, including the way arguments are passed. For the PoC, it was decided to just hardcode these arguments and only register the game with Helix using an .appconf configuration file. When it came to drawing pretty graphics on the screen, this was decidedly easier since the system uses Qt5 and thus offers the usual ways to draw to a QPixmap, which in this case maps to the framebuffer.

After a few playful sessions with the head unit’s watchdog timer, [greenluigi1] found himself staring at a blank screen, despite everything appearing to work. This turned out to be due to the alpha channel value of 0 that was being set by default, along with the need for an explicit refresh of the QPixmap. Up popped DOOM, which left just the implementation of the controls.

In order to start the game, you have to literally buckle up, and the steering wheel plus media control buttons are your inputs, which makes for a creative way to play, and perhaps wear some bald spots onto your tires if you’re not careful. If you’d like to give it a shot on your own ride, you can get the project files on GitHub.

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IR Camera Is Excellent Hacking Platform

June 1, 2023 by 14 Comments

While there have been hiccups here and there, the general trend of electronics is to decrease in cost or increase in performance. This can be seen in fairly obvious ways like more powerful and affordable computers but it also often means that more powerful software can be used in other devices without needing expensive hardware to support it. [Manawyrm] and [Toble_Miner] found this was true of a particular inexpensive thermal camera that ships with Linux installed on it, and found that this platform was nearly perfect for tinkering with and adding plenty of other features to turn it into a much more capable tool.

The duo have been working on a SC240N variant of the InfiRay C200 infrared camera, which ships with a Hisilicon SoC. The display is capable of displaying 25 frames per second, making this platform an excellent candidate for modifying. A few ports were added to the device, including USB and MicroSD, and which also allows the internal serial port to be accessed easily. From there the device can be equipped with the uboot bootloader in order to run essentially anything that could be found on any other Linux machine such as supporting a webcam interface (and including a port of DOOM, of course). The duo doesn’t stop at software modifications though. They also equipped the camera with a lens, attached magnetically, which changes the camera’s focal length to give it improved imaging capabilities at closer ranges.

While the internal machinations of this device are interesting, it actually turns out to be a fairly capable infrared camera on its own as well. The hardware and software requirements for these devices certainly don’t need a full Linux environment to work, and while we have seen thermal cameras that easily fit in a pocket that are based on nothing any more powerful than an ESP32, it does tend to simplify the development process dramatically to include Linux and a little more processing power if you can.

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It’s DOOM, But In Teletext

May 20, 2023 by 21 Comments

We’ve seen the 1993 id Software classic DOOM running on so many pieces of unexpected hardware, as “Will it run DOOM?” has become something of a test for any new device. But will it run in the circuitry of a 1970s or 1980s TV set? Not quite, but as [lukneu] has demonstrated, it is possible to render the game using the set’s inbuilt Teletext decoder.

Teletext is a technology past its zenith and which is no longer broadcast in many countries, but for those unfamiliar it’s an information service broadcast in the unseen lines hidden in the frame blanking period of an analogue TV transmission. Its serial data packets can contain both pages of text and rudimentary block graphics, and we’re surprised to learn, can include continuous streams to a single page. It’s this feature that he’s used, piping the game’s graphics as a teletext stream which is decoded by the CRT TV and displayed as a playable if blocky game.

Delving further, we find that DOOM is running on a Linux machine on which the teletext stream is created, and the stream is then piped to a Raspberry Pi which does the encoding on to its composite video output. More powerful versions of the Pi can run both processes on the same machine. The result can be seen in the video below, and we can definitely say it would have been mind-blowing, back when DOOM was king. There are plans for further refinement, of which we’d say that color would be the most welcome.

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New Tool Helps Create Laser-Cut Doom Maps

April 19, 2023 by 7 Comments

Doom has a larger cultural footprint than the vast majority of video games ever made. That inspired [Theor] to see if it was possible to laser-cut some of the game’s maps to create a real-world model of those famous original levels.

Level data was extracted from the game’s original WAD data files using code written in Rust. Maps are described by multiple “lumps” within the WAD file format, each containing information on vertexes, walls, and floors. This data was scraped and converted into SVG files suitable for laser cutting. [Theor] then built a visualizer that could display what a stacked-up laser cut map would look like in 3D, to verify everything worked correctly. With that done, the map could be laser cut without worries that it would come out a jumbled, janky mess.

[Theor] kept the finished product simple, creating the map as a stack of blue acrylic pieces. We can imagine this tool being perfect for creating a high-quality diorama though, with some work done to paint the map to match what the player sees in game. If you happen to take that approach, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!