We’re about to see Doom on an electric toothbrush…

 

 

Doom has been played on pretty much everything these days: dial-up phones, Twitter, even 100 kilos of mouldy potatoes. So with that in mind, here’s the 1993 game running from the BIOS of a motherboard.

Yes, there is now a version of Doom that runs on a motherboard firmware platform called Coreboot.

Coreboot is not your average motherboard BIOS like you’ll find on gaming PCs. It is an open-source alternative to traditional BIOS software. It aims to be more open, faster and more flexible than vendor software and is really starting to take shape. Recently, the BIOS was successfully implemented on an MSI Z690 motherboard together with the Dasharo framework.

Coreboot relies on something called a payload: the payload is the actual software that does the work after Coreboot has successfully initialized the hardware. These take various forms, including booting Linux and using the old x86 SeaBIOS, but today we are interested in one payload: the coreDOOM.

CoreDOOM, as spotted by the Linux wizards’ team Phoronix, is a payload for Coreboot 4.17 that essentially loads the system directly into the game on boot.

Excellent stuff. The whole game is actually stored in the ROM, it’s so tiny; of course, this also means that the PC does almost nothing except loading the game.

With that comes some, hmm, minor limitations. If you quit the game, the whole system freezes. Okay, that’s about it. There’s only PS/2 keyboard support, but there’s one or two of those in every gamer’s attic, right? No sound support either. Nor save support.

Look, it’s not perfect – this Doom runs from a motherboard BIOS; what do you expect?

This is essentially a port of doomgeneric, a version designed to be even more portable than the 1993 classic already is. The game’s public source code and portability are just a few of the reasons why you often see it’s the first game to be loaded onto hardware it shouldn’t be, like an ATM machine or a digital camera. Running Doom these days doesn’t seem to require much processing power. Toaster, anyone?

Source: Phoronix