Playing Doom… on a Pregnancy Test!

We are slowly reaching incomprehensible dimensions: memes beyond memes, hacks beyond hacks. Doom has completely surpassed the modern hello world concept. Every time we think of an impossible challenge or a strange platform, that platform falls. This time, programmer Foone Turing decided to accept a challenge by modifying a pregnancy test to run Doom, and although almost none of the original hardware remains... he managed it.

Doom and Doom 2 Get a Fresh Update

Doom is one of those franchises that always has something new to give. For example, did you know that Doom and Doom 2 were updated? One of the most interesting elements of the update is widescreen support, along with compatibility with the DeHackEd tool to inject patches and other addons. The rest of the news revolves around Doom Eternal, with a group of overclockers reaching the famous 1,000 FPS in its engine (under very specific conditions), the use of the game in the demo of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 card, and the announcement of its first expansion, The Ancient Gods.

From Minecraft to a Pregnancy Test

However, another hack has appeared on the Web. Another project that places the original game in an unexpected place. We have previously seen many examples, and at the end of July someone managed to run it inside Minecraft, but today we travel to Foone Turing's Twitter profile, who we remember for his exploration of reserved names in Windows. So, what is the strangest object on which Doom could run? To be honest, I don't know if there will be anything that beats a pregnancy test...

The Pregnancy Test Adventure

The adventure began on September 5, after Foone replaced the test's screen with a monochrome OLED module of 128 x 32 pixels. Bad Apple, Rick Astley, and the Skyrim intro were some of the elements he managed to reproduce, but once he shared a video with Doom, the genie escaped the lamp. Obviously, the task wasn't that simple, and Foone was forced to replace the hardware. The main reasons are two: the test's original CPU cannot be reprogrammed, and the LCD only shows four elements.

A Slightly Clearer Doom

After correcting the gamma values and zoom on the screen, Doom on the pregnancy test became a bit clearer... although not too much due to its natural definition (4,096 pixels, the same as a 64 x 64 icon). Foone promised to share additional technical details in the coming days, and confirmed he will continue his experiments with different pregnancy tests.

(Editor's note: Thanks Bernardo! He was the one who shared the news by leaving a comment, don't hesitate to do the same!)