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Hardware

You Can Run Doom on a Chip From a $15 Ikea Smart Lamp (pcmag.com) 49

Posted by msmash from the mankind-progress dept.
A $14.95 smart lamp from Ikea apparently has enough computing power to run the classic PC game Doom. From a report: A software engineer named Nicola Wrachien removed the smart lamp's computer chip and used it to build a miniaturized Doom gaming system. Over the weekend, he uploaded a video to YouTube, showing his creation in action. The system runs a downsized version of Doom that requires less RAM. The chip from the Ikea lamp has enough processing power to play the game at 35 frames per second over a cheap 160-by-128-pixel display. Wrachien, who is from Hungary, embarked on the project after reading headlines about Doom purportedly running on a pregnancy test. In reality, the pregnancy test was only able to run the game due to an added OLED display and streaming it from a PC.
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You Can Run Doom on a Chip From a $15 Ikea Smart Lamp More

You Can Run Doom on a Chip From a $15 Ikea Smart Lamp

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  • 1 year old article (Score:4, Informative)

    by tommeke100 ( 755660 ) on Monday June 20, 2022 @11:38AM (#62636050)
    pretty cool, but the article is a year old. None of the links work, including the youtube video.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by oblom ( 105 )

      It doesn't matter, we are still Doomed. ba-dum-tss.

    • Probably because the lamp has since been retired [youtu.be].

    • I remember when a site would be "slashdotted /.'ed" ( innocuosly. DDoS'ed ) by traffic driven from a slashdot article. Sadly, all the GenXers left and we're left with this. People, or accounts, driven by bots and/or teenagers with 10 phones in front of them that don't bother to check the links in the articles they are citing all while REPOSTING OF OTHER PEOPLE'S WORK. And doing almost none of their own.

    • It's OK, the same story will be reposted in a day or two and then the links might work.
  • Literally everything can run Doom with enough work. Well, except maybe punch card computers from the 60s. Prove me wrong, people.
    • Well even punch card machines from the 60s can "run" Doom at around one frame per hour with enough work. (Really gotta put yer back into it, and ignore all of the papercuts.)

    • Anything at least as powerful as an 8088 microprocessor at 4.77 MHz if I recall correctly.

    • This would make a cool project, if a bit expensive. After all, working punch-card-era equipment with enough memory for DOOM is hard to come by.

      A better idea:

      Build a simulator of an actual* 1960s punch-card system in a VR world, then have Doom "run" in it.

      *As a concession, the simulated system would be allowed to have a much larger addressable memory than most actual systems of that era.

      • But if you had a human moving the cards around, even if s/he couldn't tell whether it was interpreting a foreign language or playing a first-person shooter game, it could still be considered as "running" Doom. Something like a "Chinese Doom."
    • You are right! It runs on gameboy advance, sega 32x, super nintendo, amiga, android, you name it. The surprising thing is that it's still so popular.
    • Better challenge: Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.

  • Stretching the definition a lot (Score:4, Informative)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Monday June 20, 2022 @11:49AM (#62636092)

    While he's technically still using the PCB from that Ikea lamp, he's adding a board with flash memory, a power supply, inputs, audio hardware, and of course the display. At that point the vast majority of the hardware involved is add-on. So I don't think it's really fair to mention the Ikea lamp as being the thing running Doom. It's more the ARM Cortex m33 microcontroller that's running it.

    • It's fair as he is only claiming the processing power of the lamp.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by codebase7 ( 9682010 )
      By that definition, your computer isn't "running" Doom. You're adding flash memory / spinning rust, multiple power supplies, keyboards mice etc., the audio co-processor is external (even more so if you're using HDMI Audio), a vector processor (any modern video card), an network interface chip / card, and of course the display which is a computer in and of itself. So any modern computer is just a bunch of add-ons and none of it is running Doom or anything else. Just the X86 / ARM processor on the motherboard
    • and then he is trashing the rest of the components from the light. How about just buying the $1 processor you want from Mouser along with all the rest of the components?

      • Damn you really blew his business model out of the water. Who is to say he threw the rest of the components away?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *

        and then he is trashing the rest of the components from the light. How about just buying the $1 processor you want from Mouser

        That assumes they have it in stock. Lots of microcontrollers are in short supply right now.

    • The headline says chip from a $15 Ikea smart lamp which is indeed correct. Just like your original 486 did. In addition to the 486 it also needed a bus, ram, storage, graphic hardware, sound hardware, etc etc.

  • When Doom first came out, the family PC was powered by a 386. It ran Doom, but at less than 10FPS. It was almost like a fast slide show and only barely playable. Still, made it all the way through the shareware version with that hardware!

    These days, I suppose just about any microprocessor has more power than that 386. I'm sure the processor in the Ikea lamp has more power than it did, and the only limitation here seems to be the memory.

    • I also have fond memories of the ol' 386SX machine, got a lot of mileage out of those 10 levels.

      I wish I could remember the brand of machine we had but I have long burned out that part of my brain. I do remember it had a distinct aqua/teal colored power button though. I'd know it if I saw it.

    • Meanwhile, you need a beefy setup to run some of the community content, like SunLust or Magnolia (below).

      There are wads that run on original doom 2, and many that only require hard-coded limits to be removed.

      It's still alive and well.

      https://youtu.be/ukEGoCMn6g4 [youtu.be]

    • A decently fast 386 with a later model VGA card will run Doom pretty well at low res. I used to have a 386DX25 with 8MB RAM and a TVGA8900D (when I got it, it was just MB, CPU, and RAM in a case, and I bought the VGA card for it and added in a used ATA disk) on which I ran Linux, and it would run doom fairly well. There was an enormous variation in the performance of ISA VGA cards, and if you had one which was fairly fast and had linear addressing it would perform a whole lot better than otherwise for somet

      • This was a basic 386sx without the i387 math coprocessor and certainly didn't have a great VGA card. Don't remember how much memory it had, but I seem to recall it was right at minimum requirements to run the game.

    • We played flight simulators on our Amiga 500 with 2 frames per second at times, don't try to impress the old farts here!

      • I'd be a lot more impressed if your Amiga 500 ran Doom ;-)

        • I'd be a lot more impressed if your Amiga 500 ran Doom ;-)

          It's not the real "Doom" but there's a very clever clone called "Dread" in the works. I believe it uses the same maps as Doom, but with the graphics engine rewritten to work at playable speed on an A500 with 1MB RAM. It looks much, much better than you would expect, considering those specs! https://www.generationamiga.co... [generationamiga.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ogdenk ( 712300 )

        Pfft Amiga 500?

        I played Flight Simulator 2 on that machine's dad, the Atari 800.

        I guess you can stay on my lawn though. The Amiga was a cool as hell.

        • Solo Flight doesn't count.

          Their Finest Hour was a great sim for the Amiga, but if there were like 5 or so planes in the air at the same time and you were trying to do a close dogfight with one of them, 2 frames were already more than you could hope for.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ogdenk ( 712300 )

      I ran it on a 386DX/40 without much hassle. It could get a little sluggish in a couple spots but was actually not a bad experience. The Linux and Novell UNIXWare version was even pretty playable on my replacement 486 though just barely.

      The crazy thing is now we can get similar performance in a $1 uC with anemic onboard RAM/ROM and a crippled address bus that's not externally available.

    • Shit, the target FPS for flight sims on the Commodore 64 was 4. Four frames per second.
  • it also shows we are wasting resources. A pregnancy test can run doom. Yes, a one time use object has enough power to run doom. Pure waste of ressources.
  • Sirs; I am interested in whether one could port this 'Doom', whatever it is, to run on the Difference Engine I invented. Regards, Charles Babbage, London
  • The original Game Boy had more processing power than the space ships that first took us to the Moon, but we're surprised a modern IoT device can run a highly-optimized and stripped down of a game from nearly 30 years ago, and ran on DOS?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pz ( 113803 )

      We should be instead curious as to exactly why our machines don't cold boot in under a second, why it takes forever to register on a wifi network, why our web pages don't render instantly, and why our handheld devices aren't faster than we can percieve.

      The answer to nearly all of these questions is laziness on the part of programmers.

      I write a lot of Matlab code in my job. Now, Matlab is not known to be incredibly fast. One of the problems is that the libraries are not written well. When optimizing code,

      • We used to be limited by computing resources. If you didn't make the most of the limited resources computers offered, your program simply didn't run and you needed to figure out a new way to complete the task. If the website was too large their dial-up took too long and they went elsewhere. We aren't limited in those ways anymore. Website might take a few seconds more to load but lazy programmers don't care. Their program may run far slower than it should but they don't care. They're more likely to take the

        • And then we have a bloatfest that consumes more electrical power than it should, and a mess that is a nightmare and too much of a time sink to debug which at that point you might as well reinvent the wheel.

  • Until you realize that these overpowered embedded computers are there mostly because it's far easier to source a product that has an existing very high manufacturing volume vs opening up a whole new chip fab and production line for something much more low powered and does not have much demand outside of some very specific products.

    If we gave a smart lamp exactly what it needed to function, it would have an embedded system that was about as powerful as an Apple ][, if even that. Now if someone got a true, ac

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