In context: Doom can be run on almost anything. We know that lightweight versions can work on figurative potatoes, and it would not be surprising if someone came out tomorrow and said that they had learned to work on literal potatoes. The port that works in Microsoft Notepad shows that we are really getting closer.
There is no shortage of impractical ports of the classic 1993 first-person shooter Doom. Some of them were somewhat reasonable, for example, a developer who ported it to a low-performance Playdate laptop computer. Others were absurd proofs of the “just because I can” concept, such as a version running on a single-key display, or an Ikea smart lamp.
NotepadDoom falls into this latter category. A YouTuber named Sam “Samperson” Chiet somehow made Doom work inside Microsoft Notepad — at a speed of 60 frames per second, no less. You can see his demonstration in the video below. Samperson says he did not speed up the footage and did not modify the Notepad code.
Each frame is rendered using Notepad characters — similar to an ASCII drawing. To be honest, the graphics are nothing to look at, and playing Doom this way is likely to give you a headache before you can call it “fun.” However, this is an interesting new Notepad app and another version of Doom that we can attach to a cork board.
Chiet insists that his port is not a “trick”, but since there is only a video ahead, it is difficult to confirm this claim. Fortunately, he says he will release the code in the coming days after he fixes a few bugs and adds another level of polish to it. Until then, it’s safe to assume that, like many other Doom ports, Notepad only acts as a display while this real game is running outside of a lightweight word processor.
NotepadDoom is not the first time a hacker has introduced an id Sofware shooter into a Microsoft non—gaming software product. Earlier this year, someone made him work in Excel. Like Notepad’s noisy graphics, Excel’s sluggish frame rate makes the game almost unplayable, or at least unpleasant.
It’s just another novelty of human innovation that contributes to a movement that has become a meme. No one will ever play Doom on the display with a pregnancy test, as they are unlikely to play it for a long time in a Notebook. However, that won’t stop people from stuffing it into your motherboard’s BIOS or into an order kiosk at McDonald’s in Dorsett.
