OG Doom is everywhere right now. It’s on consoles, phones, and computers. Someone put it in a rotary phone and a calculator. I mean, damn, you can even play it on Twitter now. But in case you thought people were running out of ways to play Doom, guess what. Turns out there are still a lot of creative methods to break and shatter id Software FPS, including a, eh, Lego brick.
Yes, you read that right. A New Zealand manufacturer named James “ancient_james” Brown has equipped the smallest and smallest possible monitor with what appears to be a 3D printed Lego blue brick to run the iconic 1993 shooter, Doom. It’s terribly small, which makes it adorablely cute, but it’s probably a pain in the ass to play with.
Brown, an animatronics and graphics programmer who publishes his creations on sites like Mastodon and Twitter (and not entirely the dead funk musician), started a thread on June 6 showing off his Lego brick of PC games. The blue piece contains a small STM32F030F4P6 circuit board with an ARM Cortex M0 processor, 16K flash memory and 4K RAM. The screen is the cherry on top, though. It is a 0.42-inch OLED screen with a resolution of 72 × 40. What? That’s just big enough to see what happens. I’m imagining a lot of accidental deaths.
I connected the brick as a very small external monitor, so you can, for example, play Doom on it. pic.twitter.com/uWK2Uw7Egr
– James Brown (@ancient_james) June 19, 2022
When contacted for comments via Twitter’s DM, Brown told Kotaku that the Lego brick only serves as an external monitor, with a PC streaming Doom off-screen using a small Python script that dithering and resizing.
“The brick microcontroller has 16K of flash, which almost gives you a Doom sprite,” Brown said. “There was no way it was going to work properly. The options seemed to be: 1) Write a radicasting game with as much Doom as possible, 2) Plug in a cable and play video on it, or 3) Put it on. “A more powerful processor. It probably wouldn’t fit in with the meme. Two didn’t seem like a very interesting challenge. Three was going to take a little longer to design. But since two was so easy, someone would finally I decided I’d rather be me. “
Brown initially had no plans to bring the game to the small Lego brick. But a player’s first instinct is apparently to wonder if a console can run Doom or not, and by the time its creation went viral, the messages came flooding in. The only way to calm the masses? Give them what they want, and that’s Doom.
“When it started sharing, all the other notifications mentioned Doom,” Brown said. “So I kept quiet for seven days and waited for things to get back to normal. But people were still saying that a week later.”
And now we have Doom running on a Lego brick, and rule! I love miniature technology like this. He talks about the ever-evolving nature of technology and the relentlessness of gamers to make sure that Doom can always be played. While this brick may not be the most portable or practical way to play Doom, it reminds me of Thumby, the little Game Boy for ants. It’s also a smol handheld that is very hard to see, but probably still plays with the old school id Software FPS. Seriously, Doom is a cockroach. You can’t kill him. It’s everywhere. Maybe it will become a currency in a post-apocalyptic future … or an NFT in our dystopian present.