The other day Foone decided to hack an improved screen inside a…pregnancy test. And when you do something like that, it’s not a matter of if you can get Doom running on it, but when.
They were initially happy to just get the pregnancy test working as a screen, able to show videos of games and stuff in action:
and it can't yet run doom. That's going to be way tricky, even cheating and having a modern desktop computer connected to it… but I CAN play back a doom video on it, which is kinda close?
(Using a different dithering method here so that you can see anything: doom is dark) pic.twitter.com/BhJLYkQlXp— foone (@Foone) September 5, 2020
But that was just a start. Connecting a bluetooth keyboard to the setup meant Doom was now playable (still remotely, you can’t execute Doom on a pregnancy test’s hardware, come on) on one of the smallest, worst screens imaginable, a 128×32 monochrome display:
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
You can see more of this stuff at their Twitter account, and directly support this kind of shenanigans on their Ko-Fi page.
MORE STUFF YOU CAN PLAY DOOM IN:
You Can Play Doom (And Loads Of Other Games) Inside Minecraft
Doom is famous for running on everything from graphic calculators to ATMs, so I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising to see it playable here inside another video game, especially since that game is Minecraft.
Read more
It’s not kinda running doom at all, it’s being used to play a video. Foone is kind hopeful that maybe it will kinda run Doom, maybe, at some point.
Still, a lot less misleading than the Tegan Jones article on Gizmodo “Yes, a Pregnancy Test Can Run Doom and Skyrim”, and then you click on the story and it is literally the opposite, that no, it can’t currently run doom, and even Foone says it won’t run Skyrim. I thought you guys were better than click bait.
The last one gets somewhat close: while the hardware in the pregnancy test isn’t running the engine, it is displaying the game in real time. So it is more like using the pregnancy tester microcontroller as a display controller.
Of course, they’ve also replaced the device’s screen, since the original is not dot matrix.