The seminal 1993 first-person shooter Doom has been officially released for everything from MS-DOS to Sega Saturn to the original PlayStation to iOS, but it’s the unofficial ports that are truly impressive. “Will it run Doom?” is a question that many an enterprising hacker has asked. There’s even a subreddit, r/itrunsdoom, all about it.
Mirrorless cameras, iPod Minis, treadmills, and smartwatches can all run Doom, but the device Foone Turing ported Doom to is way more bizarre and impressive. The California-based programmer just went viral with a video of a pregnancy test running Doom. Seriously.
Well technically he first went viral with a video of a video of Doom playing on the screen of a pregnancy test, but a determined Turing eventually made it so he could play the game live on the test, posting a follow-up video that definitively shows the game running on the tiny screen.
Yesterday I had a lot of retweets and reddit posts and such for playing Doom on a pregnancy test.
But as I explained then, it wasn't really PLAYING on a pregnancy test, it was just a video being played back, not an interactive game.Well, now it is. It's Pregnancy Test Doom! pic.twitter.com/Nrjyq07EVv
— foone (@Foone) September 7, 2020
Yet another follow-up video makes it even clearer, though as Turing points out there’s only so clear a 128×32 monochrome display can be.
I tried zooming in and turning up the in-game gamma a bit, so you can see what’s going on slightly better.
(It’s a 128×32 pixel monochrome display, it’s never gonna be great) pic.twitter.com/dAU7LZ1pkT— foone (@Foone) September 7, 2020
He’s yet to post the code and documentation for how he pulled this off, but it honestly doesn’t seem that important. After all, the complete impracticality of this project, knowing that someone on the internet was motivated to pursue something so silly, is what makes it nice.
