Running id Software’s iconic first-person shooter on an adapter is unthinkable, but some people have done it.

Today, there’s a serious race to see how to make DOOM work. A lot of incredible “target platforms” have been popping up in the news, but perhaps we’ve now reached the point where it’s sounding completely unheard of. This time, the game is running on an Apple Lightning-HDMI adapter. After the Panic Blog spotted that the Apple dongle appeared to be performing upscaling tricks to stream 1080p content, it turns out that the Cupertino-based company has packed some pretty powerful hardware into the adapter for what is supposed to be a relatively lightweight device. The adapter uses a Samsung 400 MHz Arm system-on-a-chip (SoC) with 256 MB of RAM and its own internal storage for video compression and upscaling. So there is a mini computer inside the adapter!

A YouTube user has made DOOM run on the adapter, and not in a way that can be called unplayable. Since this is a game that was released over three decades ago, this hardware is plenty enough to run the game on it without any problems. Nyan Satan used the Checkm8 bootROM exploit because it allows him to run custom code on the device. Unfortunately, the demonstration video doesn’t show any input commands, but as Hackaday points out, it connects via USB 2.0, so it’s not too difficult to provide keyboard input for the game.

This raised two issues. One is that Apple has really packed some very powerful hardware into the adapter to give users the right quality. And secondly, that this is perhaps the most unusual daiy-use device ever used to get DOOM to work on it. Although we have seen more outrageous solutions, for an average prop or accessory, this may be the record.

We’re left with only one question at the end: what will be the next thing Doomguy starts slaying demons on?

Source: PCGamer