The Doomsday Button

There is no quicker way to get your retro gaming fix than by pressing The Doomsday Button. One press of this big red button launches a game of Doom on a nearby vintage PC.

This project was inspired by John Park's Doom keyboard, which launches a source port of Doom on a modern computer. I loved the idea, but strongly prefer to play classic games on original hardware over ports or emulation.

How It Works

One of the large programmable buttons on an 8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard was set to a specific combination of key presses. A python script listens for that combination, and when it is detected, a Bash script FTPs a zero-byte file to an FTP server running on a vintage Windows 95 PC.

A QBasic program running on the vintage PC checks for the presence of that zero-byte file in a loop. When it is found, it launches Doom.

Media

A game of Doom, anyone?

QBasic in all it's glory:

The Win95 setup:

My Packard Bell PC:

Bill of Materials

• 1 x Modern PC
• 1 x 8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard
• 1 x Vintage PC (Packard Bell 5340 running Win95 used here)

About the Author

Nick A. Bild, M