Plug and Slay

Is it possible for electronic gadgets to have too much power? Some will answer the question with a definitive 'no' in a Tim 'The Toolman' Taylor-esque way, while others will point out the silliness of having a microcontroller in a toothbrush and the growing problem of e-waste. Whatever side of that fence you find yourself on, there is no question that our devices are loaded with more powerful components than ever before, so we may as well make the most of them.

Hardware hacker Aaron Christophel has been building a name for himself doing exactly that. He has taken a break from hacking on smart rings and Disney MagicBands to repurpose another device for an unlikely application. This time, Christophel is working with an Anker Prime Charging Station. Now, you might not expect a gadget that charges your USB devices to have an LCD display, let alone a pair of powerful processors, but that is exactly what the Prime Charging Station has to offer.

The front of the device has a 200x480-pixel resolution LCD display, and inside the case is an ESP32-C3 microcontroller and a Synwit SWM34S system-on-a-chip (SoC) with 8MB of SDRAM and 16MB of external flash memory. It hardly seems right using all that hardware just to charge your phone, so Christophel decided that it should also play Doom.

With its abundant resources, the question was never really “can it play Doom,” but rather “how can I get it to play Doom.” After digging into some documentation, it was discovered that the Synwit SoC was the only chip connected to the display, so Christophel attached a few debugging wires to the internals of the device to load the software for execution on this Arm processor.

Aside from loading the software, no modification of the Prime Charging Station was needed. It is able to run the game very smoothly and is quite playable, although the user interface is far from perfect. There is only one click wheel, so moving, turning, using items, and firing the weapon all involve different combinations of twisting or pressing the wheel. The device does support Bluetooth, however, so perhaps in the future someone might sneak in keyboard support for a better experience.

While this is a very cool hack, it is by no means the strangest device we have ever seen running Doom. That title might just go to one of Christophel’s past hacks — this electric toothbrush. If you want to try to steal the crown, be sure to show us what you have hacked Doom onto!