A light-field display has been built using a rapidly spinning drum perforated with holes and stationary LED matrix panels behind it. Each hole reveals a different view of the rendered object, so the image changes with viewing angle and appears three-dimensional.
The prototype uses three LED panels and has an effective resolution of roughly 100 by 48 pixels per eye. Its viewing range covers only part of a full circle, but the display is already capable of running DOOM. It was built by AncientJames.
Building a mechanical 3D display was not enough; the roughly 100-by-48-pixel image also had to run DOOM. Even when the screen becomes volumetric, DOOM remains the final test.
The original 1993 DOOM has been rebuilt so that its game logic and graphics run in SQL inside a database. The game loop runs at the original 35 FPS, while the database can produce the complete 320×200 frame buffer at up to 60 Hz. The project was created by a team at CedarDB.
The renderer alone takes about 1,300 lines of SQL, with roughly another 4,000 lines for the rest of the project. Python only handles keyboard input, timing and displaying the bitmap returned by the database, and multiplayer deathmatch works too.
SQL is supposed to query data, but here it is also running the game and drawing every frame. The tradition of making DOOM run everywhere has finally reached inside the database.
Since its 1993 release, DOOM has been ported to countless devices that were never intended to be game consoles, including digital cameras, printers and pregnancy-test hardware. The 1997 release of the game's source code, together with an architecture that made platform-specific parts relatively replaceable, helped turn porting DOOM into a widespread hacking tradition.
As unusual ports spread through YouTube and social media, getting DOOM to run became less a practical benchmark and more a trophy for technical ingenuity. Recent projects have connected the game to hardware as unlikely as satellites and models of a fly's nervous system, stretching even the question of what it means for a device to 'run DOOM.'
After more than 30 years, the answer to 'Why would you run DOOM on that?' has settled into a simple 'Because you can.' Predicting the next platform may now be harder than porting the game.
Casio's 1995 Loopy game console includes a built-in thermal sticker printer for printing images from games. Throaty Mumbo's LoopyDOOM port makes that unusual hardware feature available to DOOM too: an option in the menu prints the current game frame.
DOOM itself runs on the real 16 MHz SH-1 hardware with roughly 512 KB of RAM at around 8–15 fps. Running DOOM on odd hardware is already a familiar challenge; this port goes a step further and treats the console's printer as a feature DOOM ought to support too.
Getting DOOM running was already enough, but then the port noticed the console had a printer and decided DOOM needed screenshot printing too.
Within days of the MaleCNS v1.0 fruit-fly nervous-system connectome becoming publicly available, an experiment appeared that used its simulated neural activity to control DOOM. Visual input from the game is converted into neural stimulation, while selected responses are mapped back to movement and firing controls.
Software engineer Alex Wormuth is also using damage in the game as a reinforcement signal to test whether the system can learn behaviors that help it survive. It has not mastered the game, but the speed from serious neuroscience dataset to “make it run DOOM” is remarkable.
Whenever a strange new computing platform appears, someone eventually tries DOOM. This time the platform is a fruit fly's nervous system.
Building a mechanical 3D display was not enough; the roughly 100-by-48-pixel image also had to run DOOM. Even when the screen becomes volumetric, DOOM remains the final test.