I know what you're thinking. "How banal, yet another programmer has got Doom running where it doesn't belong." And I get it: you've seen id's formative FPS running on a Lego brick, a PDF, bacteria, 100 pounds of potatoes, a pregnancy test, and even a piano. I don't think I could make up something more ridiculous than what's already been done. And yet, I am still impressed by Doombuds.
Thanks to Sydney-based web developer Arin Sarkisian, Doom now runs on a pair of earbuds. More specifically, it runs on the PineBuds Pro, which Sarkisian explains on his site are "the only earbuds with open source firmware." The buds have a CPU strong enough to run Doom with some minor tweaks—the site notes Sarkisian "cranked [the CPU] up to 300mhz and disabled low power mode," providing "more than enough" juice to run the game, albeit at around 18 fps.
Doom itself also required some tweaking so that the buds' meager RAM could handle the game, but the site explains "there are plenty of optimisations" that can cut down on Doom's required 4 MB of RAM. And while the earbuds can only hold 4 MB of data (Doom is just a bit larger than that), the 1.7 MB Squashware WAD is small enough to fit. The power of id Tech 1, in the palm of my… ear.
If you're itching to try this version of the game, you can play it without any PineBuds of your own. The Doombuds website has an embedded Twitch stream and a virtual queue where anyone can line up to connect to Sarkisian's earbuds remotely and play Doom on them from their browser. Because earbuds don't have a screen, this stream acts as the game's display.
How that exactly works is laid out on the "more info" section on the website, but suffice it to say it's a pretty novel way to experience Doom, even with the low frame rate. If you'd like to run Doom on your own PineBuds, Sarkisian has shared the means to do so on GitHub.
