Doom comes to the Pi Pico

It is with a sense of inevitability that we can confirm somebody has managed to make Doom work on the diminutive RP2040-based Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board. Running the '90s first-person shooter game on hardware ranging from ATMs to pregnancy testers is very much a badge of honor for hardcore tinkerers and the …

[milliemoo83]

Ultimate DOOM and DOOM II need closer to 14MB and 18MB respectively. Unless the compression used is *that* good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, this is "does" work not "should work"... both versions compress enough to fit in <8M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukAtTSR5MnY

[Pascal Monett]

I salute this achievement

I don't have the chops to do this kind of thing, but I'm knowledgeable enough to imagine the effort it must have been.

A well-deserved beer for this success ->

[ShadowSystems]

Try text Doom?

If you used a text front-end to Doom (https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Text_Mode_Doom) then perhaps the RPico would run the game faster since the video buffer could be used for a bit more computational oomf.

*Hands the creater a tankard & lifts mine in toast*

Keep up the good work! =-)

[Pirate Dave]

Revilution

I admit, Doom (gzdoom) is still my primary time-killer. I just finished Team TNT's Revilution megawad over the weekend, and it's very good. Two of the most monster-dense levels I think I've ever seen (in a megawad) are in there. Good stuff.

[milliemoo83]

Re: Revilution

If you fancy more fun, check out the Brutal Doom mod if you haven't already.

[Little Mouse]

"the game rocks along usually between 30-35 FPS"

Sigh - I seem to remember my old 386 juddered along at around 15 FPS.

And if I stumbled into a large "outdoor" area with lots of enemies, things got really sticky. I'd often end up dead before I even saw what killed me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "the game rocks along usually between 30-35 FPS"

Doom really wanted to be played on Pentiums, with the Ethernet flowing through hand-crafted BNC cables for maximum multiplayer carnage. At least that's what happened in the good old days before I graduated :).

[Loyal Commenter]

Re: "the game rocks along usually between 30-35 FPS"

It's actually quite impressive that the Pico has a clock speed about 5 times that of a 386, at 133 MHz (and two independent cores clocked at that).

And it comes in at less than a sandwich at a motorway service station.

[Victor Ludorum]

Top work that man

Have a virtual one ->

[Anonymous Coward]

"It is with a sense of inevitability that we can confirm somebody has managed to make Doom work on the diminutive RP2040-based Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board."

That someone being Graham Sanderson, one of the designers of the RP2040, and software architect of the RP204 SDK, and the writer of the cycle accurate BBC emulator on the Pico. He's a smart cookie.

[John Brown (no body)]

So, although still a great achievement, he's a tad more than the "enthusiast" he's described as in the article. Did El Reg not know this? Or were they just trying to amp up the story a bit?

I'd have still been impressed and not thought any less of him if El Reg had supplied the full facts :-)