We’ve been working on a super-tiny, super-sharp/readable, DOOM playing device (it does more than DOOM, but … DOOM!). DOOM is often the “hello world” for what’s possible on hardware, particularly when there’s a screen and some button inputs.

Is this one of the smallest playable Doom devices?

We ported Retro-Go https://github.com/ducalex/retro-go over to work on our QT Py ESP32 Pico board and since Retro-Go has a port of PrBoom for the ESP32, it pretty much just worked loading up the shareware DOOM1.WAD file off of a microSD card. Amazing how capable retro-go is once the hardware layout is defined.

The specs on the Adafruit QT Py DOOM playing device … (code name PINKY):

• ESP32 Pico v3 02, dual Tensilica 240 MHz core w/2MB PSRAM, 8 MB Flash
• 240×240 1.3″ TFT IPS
• microSD card
• AW9523 GPIO expander for 10 buttons, const current backlight, headphone amp mute, card detect

Video from our testing…

AND! Video from DESK OF LADYADA.

We’re going to try and see if we can get John Romero & John Carmack thoughts on if this as small / playable as it can get (and we’ll offer to send them one each, the first couple units!) along with Alex (ducalex) who did the port of prboom to retro-go.

DOOM’s source code is open source and available on GitHub as well –

The Doom source code was released on December 23, 1997, initially under a not-for-profit license. Later, permission was granted to re-release the source code under the GNU GPL on October 3, 1999.

Related:

• List of DOOM ports – Wikipedia.
• The 10 Weirdest Devices That Can Run Doom – The Gamer.
• A celebration of computer science’s most violent Hello World substitute, It Runs Doom – Tumblr.
• John Romero, Discord, shop & John Carmack – Twitter.

It’s so small! – DOOM TEXT GENERATOR.