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Doom has been ported to an earbud

306 pointsby arin-stoday at 12:22 PM99 commentsview on HN

Comments

nehalemtoday at 3:45 PM

Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.

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arin-stoday at 12:22 PM

Hi, I ported DOOM to the Pinebuds Pro earbuds. It's accessible over the internet, so you can join the queue and play DOOM on my earbuds from your PC! More info as well as links to the github repos can be found on the site.

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guerrillatoday at 11:08 PM

Awesome advertising for the Pinebunds Pro. No chance the Fairbuds can do this? I don't know much about them.

Also, with DOOM running on all these things now, is it still impossible to get it to run well on a 386?

shevy-javatoday at 4:46 PM

I am a bit said that it is always Doom.

Now ... I played the game when I was young. It was addictive. I don't think it was a good game but it was addictive. And somewhat simple.

So what is the problem then? Well ... games have gotten a lot bigger, often more complicated. Trying to port that to small platforms is close to impossible. This makes me sad. I think the industry, excluding indie tech/startups, totally lost the focus here. The games that are now en vogue, do not interest me at all. Sometimes they have interesting ideas - I liked little nightmares here - but they are huge and very different from the older games. And often much more boring too.

One of my favourite DOS games was master of orion 1 for instance. I could, despite its numerous flaws, play that again and again and again. Master of Orion 2 was not bad either, but it was nowhere near as addictive and the gameplay was also more convoluted and slower.

(Sometimes semi-new games are also ok such as Warcraft 3. I am not saying ALL new games are bad, but it seems as if games were kind of dumbed down to be more like a video to watch, with semi-few interactive elements as you watch it. That's IMO not really a game. And just XP grinding for the big bad wolf to scale to the next level, deal out more damage, as your HP grows ... that's not really playing either. That's just wasting your time.)

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7777777philtoday at 3:08 PM

List of Doom ports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doom_ports

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npsomaratnatoday at 3:59 PM

On a tangent: I remember reading John Carmak saying that as game engines became more complex, he had to relinquish the idea of writing all the (engine) code himself, and start to rely on other folks contributions as well (this was in an interview after the release of Doom 3).

I wonder what his feelings are in this age of AI.

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WXLCKNOtoday at 5:29 PM

A few more years and some more ram on these earbuds and we'll be able to run some nice local earbud kubernetes clusters

branontoday at 2:23 PM

How are the PineBuds Pro, anyone have them? The Pine64 IRC network doesn't have a channel for PineBuds discussion so I haven't had an easy opportunity to ask.

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KellyCriteriontoday at 3:22 PM

Im waiting for the post "Doom ported to disposable Vape chip" :-D

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arin-stoday at 3:53 PM

The standalone viewer (connected directly to the earbuds) also works on mobile: https://files.catbox.moe/pdvphj.mp4

No touch controls though, it just plays the intro loop

neurostimulanttoday at 4:54 PM

> Earbuds don't have displays, so the only way to transfer data to/from them is either via bluetooth, or the UART contact pads. Bluetooth is pretty slow, you'd be lucky to get a consistent 1mbps connection, UART is easily the better option.

Does this means you can run a doom instance on each bud? Is it viable to make a distributed app to use the computing power of both buds at once?

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automatic6131today at 2:49 PM

Do we have Doom on a USB-C plug microcontroller yet?

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TheCraiggerstoday at 2:46 PM

At first I thought you found a way to control/view the game acoustically and I was very curious how that worked.

But, this probably makes more sense.

catlifeonmarstoday at 6:55 PM

As an aside, I really like the style of the page. I wish it was available as a classless css dropin stylesheet.

moktonartoday at 5:05 PM

We should definitely send a playable copy of doom to aliens on a golden record on the next Voyager mission

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wolvoleotoday at 8:36 PM

But can it run crysis?

jurakistoday at 12:24 PM

This is awesome! the amount of devices doom has not been run on shrinks by the day haha

frizlabtoday at 8:16 PM

> wow this front end code is atrocious, state management is everywhe-

> shhhh don't look don't look it's ok just join the queue

love it

j1elotoday at 7:29 PM

Next up idea: ThunderDoom

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750419

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anthktoday at 6:36 PM

It's possible to run Zork I-III Frotz under a pen, some FPGA and even interpreting a PostScript file. Even the Game Boy, the C64, MSX... So, Doom is not the most ported game ever.

epenntoday at 5:15 PM

In light of this I propose "Doom's Law" as the ultimate expression of late stage capitalism:

- Society continues to produce more and more powerful devices.

- More and more of these devices begin running Doom.

- When this reaches the saturation point, society becomes Doom.

optimalsolvertoday at 4:39 PM

Relevant SMBC, "Computer scientist vs computer engineer": https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-17

lombasihirtoday at 3:36 PM

can we run doom on water pump?