A Christmas tree bauble that plays Doom | Hacker News Reader

A Christmas tree bauble that plays Doom

spritesmods.com

254 pointsdistcs42 comments

The impressiveness of this overcomes the disappointment that it wasn't some actual mass-produced ornament that happened to have a CPU powerful enough to run Doom ;)

My thoughts exactly

Sounds like it’s time for a kickstarter

Well, no. bombcar wants it to be a hack on a device that has a different purpose intended by its makers.

Yeah, I'd love the little ornament as is and would probably buy one, but the best "it runs Doom" are when it's run on something clearly not designed for it (a printer, etc).

Agreed on the “it runs Doom”, but it could be great as a “run apps from the community” where it’s super easy to share and install code (community directory and an install script that can select them, for example).

Just ideas. This thing looks super cool and runs surprisingly well. Makes me want to see it do more...

Reminds me of the Tinycircuits that have been posted here before: https://tinycircuits.com/

Does anyone have experience with Tinycircuits products? My 9-year-old daughter wants the TV and arcade for Christmas.

How hackable are they? I'm afraid it's just going to become a toy she plays with for a day and gets bored.

...

Oh, also since this is a Doom post, I'll selfishly mention that I always wish these ported-Doom-to-hardward-x projects would demo using the Ultimate Simpsons Doom 2 mod that I helped publish. https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Ultimate_Simpsons_Doom

If anyone else is curious what’s inside… Article says this is a Game Boy Advance port running on an ESP32 dev kit with an upgraded flash chip. Speaker is connected to a GPIO and display is using the serial line.

I am a simple man. I see a Doom port - I upvote it.

Nice reddit-tier comment - couldn't think of a pun too?

Bah, humbug.

Those who do not study the reddit comment section are Doomed to repeat it?

I always assumed this format was a derivative of Churchil's saying ("I am a man of simple tastes easily satisfied with the best"). Looked it up and apparently it has a distinct source of its own.

Ok, now network them.

This!

And upgrade to Duke Nukem.

At this point it's easier to just say what doesn't play Doom.

Seeing as how it runs on a pregnancy test [0], I believe this is that list:

* ...

[0]: https://twitter.com/foone/status/1302820468819288066 (This original was well below the fold on Google, shame on them.)

... that's an new display stuffed in the shell of a pregnancy test, running the game on an external processor: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1302453805057896448

This is unreasonably cute.

If there ever was a Christmas game, it is Doom!

Not that far away from the TV commercials of some major hardware store running in this season and advertizing chain-saws, drills, and lawn-mowers nicely wrapped under the Xmas tree...

IIRC there was a WAD file that added Santa hats to all the enemies. Probably had festive weapons too. It’s been 25+ years.

There's a Die Hard 2 movie tie-in game: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Die_Hard_2_-_Die_Harder_19...

The only thing more impressive than Doom being run on everything is how increasingly tiny the computer you need to do is.

does anyone make Doomagachis?

Oh; no, I forgot to feed my demon enough souls, and it died. :(

Ironically, the original IBM PC was of course completely incapable of running Doom. You needed an AT with at least a 386, and preferably a 486.

I’m sure it’ll only be a couple of years before this needs to be reviewed ;)

As a fellow Dutchman I hate how it takes literally just two seconds to hear that the author is Dutch as well just by the accent nearly all of us English speaking Dutch suffer from (conversely he could do the same with my pronunciation of English).

It's like a national shibboleth as impossible to get rid of as herpes.

Don't be so hard on him (and your fellow compatriotes). His english is perfectly fine.

Wouldn't it be weirder if he had no perceptible accent whatsoever?

I find it quite refreshing to be able to tell where someone is from, judging from their accent alone. When I was a kid, growing up in a rather rural area, I could tell with an accuracy of about 20km which area around my hometown someone I just met was from, just from by the fine differences in their accent. But in fact very few people like being identified like that.

I get it, breach of privacy and all that... but on the other hand, is it so bad to know where someone is from, when having a conversation with them

The real problem is of course the biases in people's head... "dutch people are such and such", and so on. I say we should fight the biases, not the fact that one's geographical origin can be guessed.

Not Freak_NL, but in my experience the only people actually good at recognizing the Dutch accent are Dutch people themselves (unless the accent is really bad). So in practice, it's more of a quirk than something practically bad.

Could be worse, you could be french.

Do we know what the minimum physical size is to run doom these days?

Take my money!!

A very foone Christmas!

I have to wonder about the HN attention span: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33877009 (posted 2 days ago, no reactions - not complaining, just fascinated...)

A lot of it is dumb luck. HN gets a lot of posts, most which see little to no activity. A few early upvotes seem to make all the difference in what eventually surfaces and what doesn't.

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