Many people dream of meeting their heroes. It seems like tech YouTuber Samperson got that opportunity in a round-about way recently, when legendary PC game designer John Romero reacted to a Twitter post showing how a fan got the 1993 classic first-person shooter DOOM running in Notepad.
Almost as popular as the 2007 joke "but can it run Crysis?" For developers, "can I make it play DOOM?" has become a new kind of fun challenge. As a result, yes, we have seen DOOM running on things like refrigerators,
tiny handhelds, updated
Nintendo Game & Watches,
SEGA Genesis, a
LEGO brick, and
even DOOM.
Little detail has been shared on how the developer, Sam Chiet, made this work. However, he has stated he might actually release this project as well. The video points out that the version of Notepad is 100% unmodified. In terms of how it functions, it looks like Sam utilized some DOOM engine, as there are many out there, or he built his own as the original code is now open source. He then successfully converted the WAD files to be interpreted into ASCII, which is quite a feat in an of itself. After the ASCII gets loaded into memory, it likely just sort of gets "pasted" into the character displays of Notepad. There's definitely a lot more technical nuance than we're detailing here, but this is roughly how it works at a high level.
Regardless, this project was obviously cool enough to get John Romero to react on Twitter. John Romero was one of the original developers of DOOM, alongside John Carmack, who currently is the Consulting CTO
Meta's Oculus VR division. Earlier in 2022, Romero released his
first DOOM II level in 28 years in order to support Ukrainian causes in the current Russia-Ukraine conflict.
This develop also has many other projects he plays with as well. His other most recent YouTube documented trick was attempting to revitalize Microsoft's ill-fated
Kinect motion controller. We wish Sam luck in those endeavors, and can't wait to see whatever other weird and wonderful things he can come up with next.
