The list of items that don’t run “Doom” has gotten a little shorter again: A hobbyist with the username arin-s has managed to get the classic shooter to run on wireless in-ear headphones.
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A few tricks were necessary to develop the “Doombuds,” as arin-s writes on the project’s website. Among other things, “Doom’s” memory footprint had to be reduced so that the game fits into both the flash memory and the headphones’ limited RAM. arin-s also overclocked the CPU of the in-ears. The image is transferred to an external computer via MJPEG stream.
Open-Source-Earbuds
The “Doombuds” are the Pinebuds Pro, which were considered for the project because of their open source firmware. A port of “Doom” runs on the earbuds, which only takes up 1.7 MB of storage space in the “Squashware” version – the original shareware is 4.2 MB in size and would have just exceeded the flash capacity of the earbuds.
arin-s was able to increase the RAM of the Pinebuds Pro to 992 Kbytes. Normally that wouldn’t be enough for “Doom” because the game requires 4 MB. However, hobbyist arin-s has managed to reduce the RAM requirement sufficiently by optimizing the “Doom” code. For example, he predefined lookup tables (LUT) and removed unnecessary variables.
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Finally, arin-s overclocked the CPU integrated in the earbuds to 300 MHz. That’s just enough to play “Doom” at 18 frames per second and to implement MJPEG encoding. The compressed image is sent to an external computer via the serial UART interface. The UART interface is usually used for debugging the headphones, but according to arin-s it is better suited for this data transfer than Bluetooth. It also accepts input from the computer, which allows you to control the Doom Guy.
Remote Play auf Twitch
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arin-s decided to stream the game via Twitch. You can join a waiting list on its website to play remotely on the hacked in-ears yourself. Because of 18 FPS and input lag, this is an expandable experience, at least in terms of gameplay. If you want, you can also download the “Doom” port and associated software optimized for the Pinebuds Pro and start playing with your own Pinebuds.
The porting of “Doom,” which was released in 1993, is a running gag in the hobbyist scene: programmers and hackers challenge themselves to make the shooter work on as many platforms and objects as possible. These include calculators, toothbrushes and lawn mowers, but also the PDF file format.
(Dhehi)
