DOOM and its sequel have been ported to countless devices, to the point where “can it run DOOM?” is a rite of passage for nearly every electronic capable of running custom code. Now, DOOM II is up and running on a pinball machine.
Security engineer Mark Rowe managed to get the 1994 first-person shooter DOOM II working on an Avengers Infinity Quest pinball machine. The machine has a large built-in display on the top panel, originally built for displaying animations and the current score, which has been repurposed as the main viewing area for the game. The game is controlled with the coin door service buttons, flippers, insert coin button, and other physical buttons on the pinball machine.
Rowe said in a post on Mastodon, “The main processor is an ARM Cortex A9 running an ancient version of Linux. Switches, including the flipper buttons, are managed by multiple microcontroller boards in the cabinet talking over a proprietary serial ‘node bus.’ Beyond cross-compiler hell, most of the work was writing a driver that speaks the node bus protocol and synthesizes virtual keyboard events.”
DOOM II was originally released in 1994 for MS-DOS, using largely the same engine code as the original DOOM from 1993, and both games have been ported to countless platforms and devices. The game engine’s source code release made it much easier to bring DOOM to all those systems, but some versions just run the original MS-DOS version in an emulator like DOSBox.
In addition to the many official computer and console versions, DOOM games have been ported to ATMs, thermostats, graphing calculators, and many more devices. This is another impressive hack to add to the list, and the game seems to run reasonably well, but pinball game controls don’t translate all that well to first-person shooters.
Source: Mark Rowe (Mastodon)
