'This works better than expected': Doom on a charging station looks surprisingly playable but may have the most awkward controls ever
Okay, being able to play Doom on random things lying around the house has been a running joke for some time, but someone has got the classic shooter working on a charging station, and it actually looks kind of playable. Well, playable as far as the frame rate is concerned.
Creator Aaron Christophel took to YouTube this week to show off a modded Anker Prime charging station (via Hackaday). Christophel explains that they came across the idea for this project while looking into hacking their Anker Prime 27650mAh power bank, as you do. They noticed the charging station has the same BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) connection as the power bank, and it's even got Wi-Fi. What a world we live in.
The charging station has 8 MB of SDRAM and 16 MB of external flash, plus a screen above the USB Type-C ports. For context on that figure, this battle station from 1993 (the same year Doom launched) has 2 entire MB of RAM and 100 MB of storage.
In the video, they have the charger on their desk, where they have a sheet showing off the SWM341RET7 ARM-based Microcontroller Unit. Christophel spotted, once set up, that the device can run Doom fairly smoothly when not in full-screen mode. They said 'it works better than expected', and I'm inclined to agree based on gameplay footage. It's fairly smooth, and importantly, it misses almost no colour or textures that one might expect from the game.
If you're wondering about the controls, the charging station has a built-in dial that can also be pushed down. Christophel rotates it to look up and down, pushes it in to fire and open gates, and push and rotates it to move left and right. This is why you see them firing as they open the gate. It doesn't appear to decide controls contextually; it instead clicks to fire and activate at the same time. If Christophel planned on hunting around for all the secret walls in the game, they'd run their clip dry fast.
This is just one in a long line of ridiculous ways to play Doom, but, unlike some, this is a way I think I could actually stomach giving it a go. For just a taste of how many different ways people have got Doom running, it can run on:
- 100 pounds of mouldy potatoes hooked up to a calculator
- The Apple Lightning to HDMI adapter
- A neural network generating frames one by one
- Doom itself
- A Lego brick
- A single QR code
- The teletext TV information service
- Def Con attendees' badge (and it runs at 50 fps)
Needless to say, for the techy, geeky, and just the gamers, getting Doom running on something it shouldn't has been a badge of creative honour for some time, and Christophel takes his rightful place among the others. Hey, it's a more entertaining way to use that built-in screen than just monitoring power, though perhaps less useful.