After the lawnmower, we hear again about a device that wasn’t designed for video games, but still managed to run id Software’s legendary first-person shooter.
We’re one step closer to the intercom port of DOOM, or possibly the toaster version (although it’s possible that one of those has already been created and we just don’t know about it?), because now id Software’s FPS is running on a Wi-Fi-enabled toothbrush. The man behind the toothbrush DOOM is Aaron Christophel, who hacked an internet-connected toothbrush to install a custom firmware, followed by a custom DOOM.
The Planck Mini Toothbrush’s Wi-Fi was originally designed to send information about our kids’ brushing habits even when we were not home. Sounds a little Orwellian, but that’s not the point: the hacked toothbrush used two GitHub projects to get to the point where it can run DOOM on its tiny display. The first is by Jeroen Domburg (he made Doomguy’s story work for a Christmas tree ball), and the other is Simon Howard’s miniature wad, which reduces the size of the game considerably. This was necessary because the toothbrush doesn’t have 512 megabytes of flash memory. It’s only 4 MB! (That’s how much Internet traffic you can get just by loading a web page!)
The toothbrush doesn’t play E1M1 music, of course, because it doesn’t have a speaker, but you wouldn’t expect it to. DOOM runs well on the small device and can be controlled with a simple PC mouse, but the complete lack of sound effects and music would make it a difficult game to play, as the sound effects of the demons help you to judge the terrain and their whereabouts. And the size of the screen is another complicating factor, as even thirty years ago we could play on much larger monitors!
In the video embedded below, you can see the launch of id Software’s legendary IP in action on the Planck Mini. After this, it won’t be easy to find a unique product to run DOOM on.
