Doom Comes to the Raspberry Pi Pico

It was always going to happen, because of the law. Any hardware capable of running DOOM, will at some point, run DOOM. From the very point of creation, it is already doomed to a future of DOOM. This time, it's the RP2040 of the Raspberry PI Pico - and it's an incredible achievement.

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This is no mean feat, as the RP2040 has only 264kb of useable RAM and only 2MB flash storage. Add to this the fact that Graham Sanderson - the project's creator - set himself the difficult task of running the shareware copy of DOOM as it was originally intended. This meant a resolution of 320 x 200, OPL2 music, stereo sound - everything.

This presented a problem, as the original shareware version of DOOM is twice as large as the Pi Pico's flash capacity, which led to some interesting data compression and access throughout. It's a stunning project that gives a true DOOM experience, and users can even play over a hardware network using the GPIO pins of the Pi Pico.

The full write-up of the project can be found on Graham Sanderson's GitHub page along with source code and build instructions.

DOOM2040

DOOM on everything has become a bit of a joke, but every time the legendary game is ported to a new device it represents a triumph over architecture and constraints. Sometimes, it's not even a specific chip that makes it cool - remember when Foone Turing put DOOM on a pregnancy test? 

If anything, this latest iteration just goes to show yet another reason why you should get a Raspberry Pi Pico . They are incredible from so many points of view - whether you are a beginner looking for your first pico projects or looking for something you can use in your day-to-day life like a custom pico keyboard macro pad.

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