In the News

Chocolate Doom's portability has made it convenient for people seeking to run Doom on esoteric computers (see the It runs Doom! blog). Here is a collection of news articles confirmed to have been using Chocolate Doom or one of its forks.

Doom on a John Deere Tractor (September 2022)

One day, the classic 90s shooter Doom will be playable on every single electronic device with a screen. We aren’t quite there yet, but thanks to some crafty hackers you can now play id’s seminal shooter on a jailbroken farm tractor because we live in the weirdest, dumbest cyberpunk future imaginable.

Over the weekend in Las Vegas, DefCon 2022—a large annual convention dedicated to hacking and computers—happened and, during the event, some modders showed off a jailbroken tractor computer. The tractor computer was hacked by Sick Codes as part of an effort to bring more awareness to how little control farmers have over their own equipment, which is often running proprietary software and can’t be easily modded or repaired.

The Chocolate Doom icon can be seen in the upper left corner of the window during the Doom demo.

• Someone Got Doom Running On A Farm Tractor - Kotaku
• John Deere tractor hack reveals food supply vulnerable to cyber attacks - ABC News
• A New Jailbreak for John Deere Tractors Rides the Right-to-Repair Wave - WIRED

Doom inside Doom (July 2022)

YouTuber and Doomworld community member kgsws has set a new standard for, well, something with this brilliant bit of techno-recursion: Doom running in Doom [...] The video is basically a mini-documentary of kgsws' process, but if you want to get straight to the good stuff it starts at around 8:10, when he gets the Chocolate Doom source port imported into the exploit.

• Doom hacker gets Doom running in Doom - PC Gamer
• You can now play 'Doom' inside 'Doom II' - Engadget
• You can now play Doom inside Doom - Wired UK
• Doom Can Now Be Played In Doom - IGN

Doom ported to the Raspberry Pi Pico (March 2022)

The port was performed by Graham Sanderson and the full shareware game (DOOM1.WAD) is playable on a vanilla Pi Pico (with 2MB of flash storage). "RP2040 boards with 8M should be able to play at least the full Ultimate Doom and DOOM II WADs," he said.

While Sanderson did not use code from the other minimalist Doom ports out in the wild, he did give credit to Chocolate Doom and iD Software.

• Doom comes to the Pi Pico - The Register
• Now you can play Doom on a Raspberry Pi Pico - ZDnet
• Raspberry Pi Pico Receives Playable Doom Port - Tom's Hardware
• Doom Now Playable On A $4 Raspberry Pi Pico - Forbes

Multiplayer Doom on Cloudflare Workers

Logo from Cloudflare's writeup about porting Chocolate Doom to run on Cloudflare edge workers.

There are halls and corridors in Cloudflare engineering, dangerous places for innocent wanderers, filled with wild project ideas, experiments that we should do, and extremely convincing proponents. A couple of months ago, John Graham-Cumming, our CTO, bumped into me in one of those places and asked: "What if we ported Doom multiplayer to work with our edge network?". He fatally nerd-sniped me.

[...]

We also found Chocolate Doom, a modern, community-driven, well-maintained port that aims to reproduce the original DOS version of Doom and has a few bonuses, like networked multiplayer support, and a decent, readable, and modular codebase. Perfect match.

Long story short, we got Emscripten to compile Chocolate Doom a few days later. It felt like magic when we saw Doom running in a browser window for the first time. The magic is WebAssembly.

• Multiplayer Doom on Cloudflare Workers
• silentspacemarine.com - live demo

Doom on Game & Watch (November 2020)

Naturally, hardware hacking channel Stacksmashing took the thing apart to see what else the teeny piece of kit could run. There was, of course, only one answer.

"After I posted my last video about hacking the new Nintendo Game & Watch, the people [...] made one thing very clear: The Game & Watch has to run Doom."

The port is based on Chocolate Doom.

• Nintendo’s Game & Watch can run Doom, barely - The Verge
• Nintendo Game & Watch latest platform to run Doom - GamesRadar
• Of course Doom can run on Nintendo's Game & Watch alarm clock - PC Gamer

Doom on a pregnancy test (Sep 2020)

No "first-person shooter" jokes, please: A hardware wonk has successfully played Doom on a pregnancy test. By removing most of the interior of the test, including the original CPU, Foone Turing used its tiny one-color display first to stream video of the classic video game, and then actually play it.

Articles don't mention but this is confirmed to be using Chocolate Doom (citation).

• This Programmer Figured Out How to Play Doom on a Pregnancy Test - Popular Mechanics
• Guy runs 'Doom' on a pregnancy test and wait, what? - Mashable

Myki Card Readers (May 2020)

If you’ve ever wondered whether those dodgy card readers in Melbourne are capable of doing something greater, yes: they can run DOOM.

One cheeky Melbournian managed to take a Myki card reader home with them – how I have no idea – and decided to answer the age old question. Given that Myki card readers are all run off Windows CE, it meant that running DOOM was possible. Using Chocolate DOOM, redditor zbios installed the id classic onto the myki reader via the terminal’s flash port (as there’s no USB ports to plug into).

• Myki Card Readers Can Play DOOM Too - Kotaku Australia
• Someone got Doom running on a melbourne Myki reader - Press Start Australia

Doom on NES (June 2019)

Doom is one of my favorite games, which is convenient because it will run on almost any device. Digital cameras, old Nokia phones, a Zune, you name it. If it can be connected to a screen, someone has probably modded it to run Doom, and if they haven't, someone is probably working on it.

The original Nintendo Entertainment System is a notable exception to the rule, but an understandable one given that it's just not powerful enough. First released in Japan in 1983, the NES had 2kb of RAM and was designed to run 8-bit games, while 1993's Doom is one of the earliest 3D games that required 8mb of RAM. These immutable facts did not prevent YouTuber TheRasteri from getting an NES to run Doom…sort of.

(TheRasteri mentions in the video that his port is based on Chocolate Doom)

• How to Run 'Doom' on an NES - Vice
• Play Doom on NES Thanks to This Custom Raspberry Pi PCB - PC Magazine
• Custom Raspberry Pi PCB Lets You Play Doom on an NES - Tom's Hardware

Doom on a Thermostat (May 2017)

In a YouTube video spotted by Hackaday, user cz7 asm unveils their Doomostat—a Honeywell Prestige thermostat hooked up to a SNES controller that appears to run Doom quite nicely.

"An outcome of my recent project—porting Doom on a thermostat," explains cz7 asm. "A really nice piece of hardware on a well engineered board using ARM9 processor. The Doom engine is based on Chocolate Doom and also its STM32F429 port."

• You Can Play ‘Doom’ On a Thermostat Because Of Course You Can - Vice
• Playing Doom on a Thermostat - Hackster
• Doomed Thermostat - Hackaday

Doom on a Chainsaw (May 2016)

Bethesda and id Software's Doom reboot is just a few days out, which makes this the ideal time to have a look at Doom 2 running on a chainsaw. But not just any chainsaw, no: This is the Painsaw.

It's actually a toy saw, into which creator and self-professed not-creative guy George Merlocco crammed a Raspberry Pi Zero loaded with Chocolate Doom, a source port created as an “accurate reproduction of the game as it was played in the 1990s.”

• Here's Doom 2, running on a chainsaw - PC Gamer