Aaron Christophel Ports Doom to a Toaster — And You'd Better Play Well If You Want Unburnt Toast
Finish the level quickly, or you'll be able to smell the hellfire — or, rather, your toast going up in smoke.
Engineer and maker Aaron Christophel has brought a little hellfire to breakfast, by porting id Software's seminal 1993 first-person shooter Doom to an actual, literal toaster — which, for some reason, comes with a built-in full-color touchscreen display linked to a single-board computer.
"Yes, this is as stupid as it sounds," Christophel warns in the introduction to his latest video. "It's a toaster with a freaky LCD display with touch. What I can directly tell is it does not feature any Wi-Fi [connectivity], which makes it even more strange that they built such a thing and then [didn't] even put Wi-Fi inside. After plugging it in, it will boot and has this freaky menu where you can basically like slide between different breads and so on, and now you can change the amount of cooking, or baking, or whatever. Toasting. And it's even changing the images, which is really funny."
The march of Moore's Law two-pronged in its effect on the technology industry. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's observation that the number of transistors on a cutting-edge node trends towards a doubling every two years means the next generation of hardware is usually more powerful than the last, but also means that older generations become steadily cheaper to make — until you reach the illogical conclusion of a toaster that's also a fully-functional computer.
Inside the machine, a aeco Toastlab Elite, Christophel found a single-board computer based on an ArtInChip Technology D133CBS system-on-chip, rebadged to read "K660L," with external flash and unpopulated footprints for what is almost certainly the missing Wi-Fi connectivity option. Dumping the flash chip revealed the stock firmware, running atop a real-time operating system — and enough information to find a software development kit for compiling a new firmware, starting with a simple LVGL demo and progressing to the real target: id Software's Doom (1993).
While simply running the game on the toaster was the project's goal, Christophel took things one step further: the game will only start when the toaster is actively toasting, and the toaster will only stop toasting when you finish a level — meaning the scent of hellfire isn't in your head, but the smell of your breakfast burning because you couldn't hit the par time on E1M1.
The full project is detailed in the video embedded above and on Christophel's YouTube channel.