The tradition of running the legendary game Doom on various gadgets and appliances that were not originally designed for gaming is long, but this one takes the cake.
Foone, a programmer who likes reverse-engineering things and typically works with ancient hardware and software, has managed to run a fully functional game of Doom on an electronic pregnancy test.
After posting a video of the classic video game running on the tester over the weekend, on Monday Foone upped the ante and released a video of him actually playing Doom on the tester, using a wireless keyboard.
Yesterday I had a lot of retweets and reddit posts and such for playing Doom on a pregnancy test.
But as I explained then, it wasn’t really PLAYING on a pregnancy test, it was just a video being played back, not an interactive game.Well, now it is. It’s Pregnancy Test Doom! pic.twitter.com/Nrjyq07EVv
— foone (@Foone) September 7, 2020
The experience isn’t very pleasant because the pregnancy test has a 128×32 pixel monochrome display (see close-up below), but, amazingly, it works.
I tried zooming in and turning up the in-game gamma a bit, so you can see what’s going on slightly better.
(It’s a 128×32 pixel monochrome display, it’s never gonna be great) pic.twitter.com/dAU7LZ1pkT— foone (@Foone) September 7, 2020
You might be wondering, how the hell is this even possible on an extremely simple gadget such as a pregnancy tester? Well…it isn’t. Foone is cheating a little; he had to replace the pregnancy tester’s CPU and LCD, essentially turning it into a much more powerful computer (still extremely simple by today’s standards, but compared to a pregnancy test or a computer from the early ’80s, it’s pretty powerful).
The existing CPU can’t be reprogrammed and the existing LCD can only show 4 things, so I had to replace both to make any changes.
And the current version doesn’t even fit into the shell!
(although I’m certain it will when complete) pic.twitter.com/BVcC6OTxaq— foone (@Foone) September 6, 2020
Still, the entire exercise is so cool that we had to share. What’s next, Crysis? Fingers crossed.