Doom has been used on a variety of devices, including Apple’s Touch Bar and inkjet printers. Now, you can play the game on a small Lego brick that functions as an external monitor and a basic controller. It is simple to try to replicate the idea because the necessary components are likewise fairly inexpensive.
A Twitter user showed off a modified Lego block having a small display and then proceeded to play Doom on it. The 72×40 resolution of the 0.42-inch monochrome OLED screen is hardly adequate to view what is occurring in-game.
The hollowed-out blue brick also houses an STM32F030F4P6 microcontroller with a single-core ARM Cortex-M0 operating at 48 MHz, 4 KB of RAM, and 16 KB of flash storage. This hardware is necessary to operate the display, and it’s not enough to run Doom by itself, with certain sprites inside the game using significantly more space than 16 KB.
Instead, Doom is rendered on a PC offscreen while a Python script handles scaling and dithering. The Lego brick serves as a small external display. Even the two studs on top have capacitive touch controls that let you navigate the game.
If you want to reproduce the odd project, the user has set up a Twitter thread where he goes into great detail on how to do it.
Doom was first made available on MS-DOS by id Software approximately thirty years ago. The firm has now released it on dozens of other platforms and gaming consoles. Unauthorized ports of the game also began to appear on a variety of strange gadgets, including thermostats, oscilloscopes, McDonald’s cash registers, Ikea smart lamps, and even a Porsche 911.
To read our blog on “With this BIOS upgrade, you may play Doom directly from your motherboard,” click here.
