It wasn’t enough to have id Software’s eternal classic running on a potato, and it wasn’t enough to have seen Doom Guy’s story running in the BIOS of a PC motherboard. No, an even steeper port has seen the light of day…

According to the port’s creator Sam Chiet, “this is the ideal way to play” DOOM, and although he meant the comment as a joke, the Notepad port isn’t that bad, running at sixty frames per second. Not many consoles back in the day could do that (the SNES version, for example, ran slowly), but let’s not forget that the visuals aren’t that good, and the game flickers here and there. However, id Software’s game runs in a program that only uses characters, and you can see where things are happening. The lack of colour doesn’t seem to be a huge problem either.

It wouldn’t be a big surprise if one now thinks this must be a modified Notepad or perhaps Notepad++. According to Chiet, this is the bare, original, untouched text editor in Windows, so no such trickery is involved. It has already caught the attention of one of the original creators, John Romero, who has replied to the port’s creator. Even though he only wrote one word (“Incredible”), this is a great tribute!

Chiet will publish DOOMpad soon, but there are still some hurdles to overcome. For example, Windows claims that he has recreated the Ulthar malware when there is no such thing. He thinks we should swallow the Windows Defender nonsense. There is already a similar solution: DOOM-ASCII runs on a text-based terminal at any time, so the question that is often asked on Reddit (“does DOOM run on it?”) is not a coincidence, because there is a subculture nowadays around what you can play John Carmack’s game on.

And there’s the source code because id Software made it accessible for non-profit purposes in 1997, so anyone can try to port DOOM. We can’t wait for the toaster port, seriously. If there’s a display on one of them, it’s bound to happen…

Source: PCGamer