From pregnancy tests to John Deere tractors, through a hell of rotten potatoes and special versions for old computers, the classic Doom has been adapted to everything. If it has a little memory and a screen, the most likely thing is that someone can run it, but there is also an advanced type of hack: playing Doom inside other programs. The latest? A YouTuber named Samperson claims to have played Doom in Notepad at 60 FPS, without modifications…
A couple of years ago, someone installed Windows XP inside Minecraft to play Doom. We also can’t forget the possibility of loading the game as a Coreboot payload, which amounts to Doom in the BIOS. And in mid-July, “kgsws” managed to modify Doom’s basic files to run itself.
What conclusion can we draw from all this? The Doom community is completely crazy, and we love it. The combination of hacks, special ports, and a better knowledge of hardware/software has allowed the classic id Software game to run almost anywhere, and every time we imagine a ceiling or limit, something new arises. That said, let’s make room for Doom in Notepad, at 60 frames per second.
Doom in Notepad: Rip and tear in pure ASCII
YouTuber Samperson explains four things: The video is not sped up, the Notepad executable (notepad.exe) was not modified in any way, the demo is functional and without tricks, and somehow “this is our fault”. All the relevant code will be shared “soon”, but the details end there.
In the community’s opinion, the 60 FPS are actually 35 FPS native with brutal tearing (let’s not forget the standard version of Doom runs at 35 FPS), and Notepad basically works as a screen, receiving the buffer from an renderer ASCII. Anyway, John Romero himself gave his blessing, declaring the project “incredible”.
The rest is a matter of waiting to learn a bit more about the technical side. Meanwhile, nothing stops us from downloading a copy of FastDoom and “enjoy” its text-mode rendering…
