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Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware
Technology
Zak Killian

DOOM left running on ASUS MyPal PDA for 2.5 years finally crashes — bug that crashes the game when gametic value hits 2,147,483,647 ticks likely to blame

The title screen of the classic video game DOOM.

Released in December of 1993 after an unbelievable amount of hype among PC gamers hooked up to the then-novel Internet, DOOM codified the standards of the nascent first-person shooter genre and was so popular that "Doom clone" was the way we described first-person shooters for years after its release. Gamers have put millions, if not billions of hours, into the title in the nearly 32 years since its launch, thanks to a virtual cornucopia of mods and user levels, but it's pretty unlikely that many of them have left the game running for upwards of two years straight. At least one person did, though, and the result is... that it crashed.

Posting at LenOwO, site admin Minki remarks that they have reproduced the expected crash by loading WinDOOM on what appears to be an ASUS MyPal A620 pocket PC from 2003 running the then-novel Windows Mobile on an Intel XScale ARMv5 SoC. Minki says that the device was modified to use a "DIY 18650 [lithium cell] based UPS which was itself connected to the USB port of my router for a constant 5V supply." They left the system running and mostly forgot about it until yesterday, when they noticed a pop-up appearing on the device and complaining of an application crash:

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