Where can Doom turn? On an IKEA lamp

Which of you goes to IKEA to buy a light bulb to run Doom on? I think a bit of everyone, by now buying light bulbs to illuminate is out of fashion. Seriously, the "Doom everywhere" craze is now rampant on the web, developers who try their hand at being able to run the original Doom in devices not absolutely designed for video games . We talk about devices such as calculators, public transport ticketing systems, pregnancy tests , and now a developer has managed to run Doom even on an IKEA light bulb!

Nicola Wrachien, a Hungarian engineer and programmer, bought an IKEA smart light bulb, known as TRÅDFRI, and reprogrammed the microcontroller inside to run the game .

How is it possible to run a game on an IKEA light bulb?

Yes, apparently a tens of dollars lamp from IKEA has enough computing power to run the classic PC game Doom . It is in fact a smart light bulb, and as such it needs something on board that allows it to do calculations.

This calcosa is an ARM Cortex M33 microcontroller with 96 + 12 kB of RAM . There is no shortage of surrounding hardware: the engineer has created a separate card equipped with 8 MB of flash memory, power connectors, audio ports and a keyboard, which connected to the Ikea lamp chip . The system is then connected to a display and makeshift 8-key keyboard. The IKEA lamp already has 1 MB of flash memory on board but it turned out to be too little for DOOM, thus forcing Nicola Wrachien to use an external flash memory.

All this allowed Doom to run decently at 35 FPS with a resolution of 160 × 128 pixels . However, this is not a "basic" version of the game but rather the transposition for the Game Boy Advance, therefore already lightened. In addition, it has removed the music and all other sound effects to allow the application to run in just a few hundred RAM.

Are you impressed by all this? Do you think it runs not only on calculators, but also iPods, inkjet printers, a Porsche 911 (and the controls? a single key on the keyboard, the Touch Bar on Apple MacBooks, a McDonald's cash register, John McAfee's “non-hackable” cryptographic wallet, the Playdate portable console, the Commodore 64 and various ATMs.

Doom: a bit of history

For those unfamiliar with it, Doom is a video game created by Id Software and released back in 1993 for PC , and only later was it released for other consoles. Together with Wolfenstein 3D (also part of other challenges similar to those we are witnessing for Doom), he is considered one of the most influential examples of the first-person shooter genre .

A peculiar feature of the game is the innovative (for the times) use of 3D graphics, together with a fast and rather simple style of play, all accompanied by a high rate of violence. It became very popular in a short time, for several years after its release other games of this genre were defined as "a la Doom", thus giving birth to a real videogame genre.

The article Where can Doom turn? On an IKEA lamp it was written about: Tech CuE | Close-up Engineering .