The problem of getting Id Software program’s traditional first-person shooter Doom working on uncommon units has reached an controversial peak, as Wojciech Graj will get it working in a manner no person has ever carried out earlier than: over audio alone.
“The sport is displayed by producing an audio sign that may be seen as a spectrogram,” Graj explains of the weird mission, which makes use of audio for each output and enter, “whereas enter is taken from the microphone, with particular frequencies being mapped to particular keys. It took important effort to get Doom to run on this method, and it’s being performed in a manner which clearly wasn’t meant, regardless that it isn’t a {hardware} machine that’s working Doom.”
Graj’s remark refers back to the conventional hacker sport of porting Doom, launched in 1993 to crucial acclaim, to ever extra uncommon {hardware}. We have seen Doom working on GPS receivers, thermostats, in-car leisure programs, the Nintendo Leisure System, the Raspberry Pi Pico, and even Doom working in Doom itself. Generally it is not the bottom {hardware} that differs, although, however the show machine — as with this mission to make a playable model of Doom streamed through Teletext to an appropriate TV set.
It is this method which Graj has taken together with his port: the precise sport of Doom is working on an ordinary laptop, however it’s not drawing its graphics to the monitor. As an alternative, it is producing a continuing audio sign that, when seen as a spectrogram, makes up an image — then beginning once more with the following body. Audio inputs can be utilized to manage the sport, although its framerate is understandably poor — however it’s technically playable, which meets the definition of a real Doom port.
Graj has uploaded the supply code for the mission to GitHub beneath the GNU Normal Public License 2, with further info out there in his Reddit submit.
