Is there anything you can't run Doom on? Apparently not.
The latest example takes the famous FPS and plays it on a thermal receipt printer. No, really.
One of the great things about technology is that some people can't see a device without thinking, "Can I run Doom on that?"
In recent years, that's brought us Doom in ChatGPT, and running on a heat pump, a smart planter, and a Xiaomi Mi Band 8. We've even seen Doom operating in a digital audio workstation plugin, and even more. But it's never been ported to a humble receipt printer... until now.
In a new YouTube video, Bringus Studios show the process of bringing the classic shooter to a printer. And while the lack of a display would put most people off, Bringus was undeterred.
How on earth can you play Doom on a receipt printer?
Receipt printers are pretty fast, so the mod uses the printer's thermal paper as the display and its built-in speaker for the audio. The processing happens on a PC, but the printer is the output device, with the PC running a script that sends single frames from the game to the printer.
The result, as you can see in the video, is rather unpredictable – but it does indeed run Doom, albeit wastefully, expensively and painfully slowly, with horrendous lag between the player moving and each image being printed.
Perhaps even more remarkably, Half-Life works too, generating cute little screenshots.
As with other ports of Doom, the point isn't to play the game but to overcome the many challenges of getting the legendary FPS onto devices that clearly weren't made for such tomfoolery. It puts this project alongside Doom on ATMs, an oscilloscope, on printers' embedded displays, and on a Texas Instruments graphing calculator. There's even a version running on a digital pregnancy test out there.
But the gold standard for weird Doom has to be MIT student Lauren “Ren” Ramlan's project, which got the game working on a display made from e.coli bacteria. As Ramlan wrote: "To run Doom, all one needs is a screen and willpower."
