After Doom on a landline phone, a pregnancy test, a rotten potato hell, a digital camera, and a Game & Watch, what's next for the Doomguy and the forces of hell? Basically, playing Doom in a computer's BIOS. This is possible thanks to the magic of Coreboot, an open-source replacement for many proprietary BIOS and UEFI firmware, and beyond the natural restrictions of that platform, we're surprised it hadn't happened before...
Coreboot is a project that started in 1999, and since then it has focused on providing an open-source alternative for BIOS/UEFI on motherboards, laptops, and other embedded systems. One of Coreboot's advantages is its resistance to bricking (which unfortunately remains quite common when updating a traditional BIOS/UEFI), and some companies are already installing it in their products.
Another Coreboot feature is that it works with the concept of payloads: first it initializes the hardware, then it hands over control to another element. Some popular payloads are SeaBIOS (adopted by QEMU) and TianoCore, but one piece was missing from the puzzle: using one of those payloads to play Doom on the BIOS.
Playing Doom on the BIOS as a Coreboot payload
How is this possible? The Canadian student Nicholas Chin explains it on GitHub. His "coreDOOM" project is based on a port of doomgeneric, which reduces and simplifies the creation of ports for Doom to a few functions. The idea came after a message on the Coreboot Discord server, where someone mentioned that Barebox (a bootloader designed for embedded systems) has its own version of Doom called bareDOOM, but Coreboot doesn't. All coreDOOM does is fix that situation.
Limitations? All you can imagine and more. First, Coreboot is compatible with a reduced list of hardware, and its installation is not exactly easy (in fact, the official page recommends the end user to purchase a machine with Coreboot preinstalled). At the same time, coreDOOM doesn't allow WAD selection since it works with the integrated/hardcoded WAD in doomgeneric, it only works with PS/2 keyboards, there's no sound (doomgeneric also doesn't offer support), games can't be saved due to its read-only profile, and when you exit the game, the computer hangs.
Perhaps for all these reasons we couldn't find a single image or video of coreDOOM in action, but we know it's only a matter of time, and that raises a new question: Is there any platform left where Doom hasn't been installed...?
Official site: Click here Source: Phoronix
