When you buy a piece of furniture you’re usually looking for something that fits the theme of your home. Nobody wants a purple couch, for example, if it clashes with the overall design of their house. It will just look weird and become an eyesore. This goes for lamps, too. Which is why you need to have a certain aesthetic to require a lamp from IKEA that you can play DOOM with.
Thanks to the group at next-hack, a lamp you can buy off the warehouse floor at IKEA is officially capable of playing DOOM. Why would someone try to make an IKEA lamp computer capable of playing DOOM? Besides a need to port DOOM to every computer ever made, a viral story about a group that attempted to make DOOM playable on a pregnancy test piqued next-hack’s interest.
They said in their blog post that the viral pregnancy test was technically not true. Though the LCD screen on the device could be used to appear like DOOM was running on it, the game was not actually playable. But that presented them a new challenge.
In fact, as clearly reported in Foone’s tweets, the author was trying to find what was inside an electronic pregnancy tester. Since the electronics was not reprogrammable, and the LCD was able to show just few segments, Foone replaced the display with an OLED display, and used a Teensy 3.2 board (featuring a 72 MHz Cortex M4). Later, Foone was also experimenting in streaming videos to the OLED display, attached to the Teensy, via the USB port. To do this, Foone used the SDL library to downscale and dither a window containing the video to be streamed, and sent it to the USB port, probably using the virtual CDC USB COM interface.
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We wanted to challenge ourselves once more, this time by bringing our contribution to the list of unusual things Doom has been ported to (this time for real!)
Well they certainly accomplished it this time and they even showed their homework throughout the entire process. For anyone that’s savvy with electronics and computer, they have their entire process explained on their blog post. If anyone wants to attempt this themselves please be careful and do so safely. There are many more reasonable ways to play DOOM, but this one is officially up there as one of the more creative platforms to game on.
[via Vice]