This Whole Doom Thing Has Gotten Out of Hand

Running Doom on unlikely hardware is a time-honored and respected tradition in our community. As a result, we’ve seen the game running on just about every kind of device imaginable. But there is one exception: headphones. Now Arin Sarkisian has claimed that too, by running Doom on the PineBuds Pro wireless earbuds.

If you’ve heard of Pine64, it is probably for their Pinecil soldering iron. That is very popular among makers as an affordable option with open firmware, which users can update or replace to change the functionality. Pine64 just recently released their PineBuds Pro wireless earbuds that boast similar open firmware. That gave Sarkisian an opening to install custom firmware to host Doom.

Firmware access is one thing, but Doom still requires a fair bit of computing power to run. Luckily, the PineBuds Pro earbuds have just enough, thanks to their BES 2300YP SoCs (one in each earbud). The BES 2300YP has a surprisingly powerful dual-core 300MHz Arm Cortex-M4F with 992KB of SRAM and 4MB of accessible flash storage. That proved enough to run a port of doomgeneric that Sarkisian built for the earbuds.

Of course, those earbuds don’t have displays or buttons suitable for gaming. Instead, Doom runs on one of the earbuds (either one) and sends an MJPEG stream over a UART serial connection to a separate device that hosts a web server. The player interacts with the game through that web server, which then passes control inputs back over serial to the game instance.

In fact, because that runs on a web server, you can play Doom on Sarkisian’s PineBuds Pro earbuds right now through a website he created called DoomBuds. You might need to join the queue if other people are already playing, but you can see a stream of the current game instance. That runs very smoothly, without any compromised graphics aside from some minor compression artifacts.