Nintendo's Alarmo alarm clock was hacked and made to run the shareware version of Doom by Twitter user GaryOderNichts, who uploaded a gameplay video of the completed job to a Twitter thread earlier this week.
Within the thread, Gary details that there is currently no audio support and that the Doom shareware .wad needs to be compressed and then uncompressed to the memory on boot to circumvent USB loader memory size restrictions. Gary also claims you shouldn't need to modify your Alarmo if you want to test this for yourself—the project files you need are all hosted on GitHub.
So, how exactly is this possible? As detailed in an extended blog post also posted by Gary, this project started by opening up an Alarmo and identifying the actual hardware inside. The Nintendo Alarmo utilizes an STM32H730ZBI6 Arm Cortex-M7 processor, which is, fortunately, a well-documented kit. This enabled Gary to hack his Nintendo Alarmo and connect it to his Raspberry Pi.
After my last post, it was pretty clear what everyone wanted to see on the Alarmo. So, here it is - Doom running on the Nintendo Alarmo! pic.twitter.com/WimckYPnXZNovember 2, 2024
While Gary did some soldering and modding to figure out how to get this exploit working, the final version hosted on GitHub is much more straightforward. It does not require a modded Alarmo to pull off the Doom launch off USB.
The controls of Doom on Nintendo Alarmo are all built around the controls up top, which include two buttons and a pressable or swipeable touch dial. In Alarmo Doom, that swiping motion is used to aim left and right, while shooting is done with the notification button on the lower right. Other controls are either undocumented or simply unused in the video demonstration, which shows one of the first levels of Doom.
As unconventional as a $99 alarm clock from Nintendo is, Nintendo Alarmo is far from the only expensive consumer electronics piece on which we didn't expect to see Doom run. We've also seen Doom playable on a smart lawnmower, the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 microcontroller, and even an air hockey table. Someone even made an expansion card for the ancient Commodore 64 to give it enough juice to play Doom.
