Fake It Till You Make It

Over 30 years after its initial release, Doom now runs on just about every hardware platform with a processor and a little bit of memory that you can imagine, from toothbrushes to GPS receivers. This makes it easier than ever to fight hordes of demons and the undead to save Earth from being invaded. But as hardware hacker Aaron Christophel recently found out, there are limits to where Doomguy may wander.

Christophel was digging into a grossly-overpowered Aspire PIXO vape and realized that it didn’t have what it takes to run an early 1990s first-person shooter. The Puya PY32F403 series 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller running at 144 MHz would have no problem with it, nor would the external 16 MB flash chip. But the paltry 64 KB of SRAM just was not going to cut it.

This just didn’t sit well with Christophel, however. Doom must run on everything, and that means everything! So rather than admitting defeat, he went with the next best available option and faked it. He used an application powered by WebSerial that transmits screenshots from a computer over USB. The vape was flashed with custom firmware that simply displays these screenshots.

So what this really is is a tiny 320x170-pixel second monitor with a refresh rate somewhere around six frames per second. That is not exactly what you might be looking for in a monitor, but at least it allows this vape to sorta kinda play Doom. And sorta kinda playing Doom is without question better than not playing it at all.

For more hacky good times with discarded vapes, check out this one that was turned into a web server. Hmm, that gives me an idea. I think the time has come for online multiplayer Doom powered entirely by vapes. Time to get hacking!