From the Touch Bar on MacBook Pro computers to pregnancy tests, Doom has passed through many small screens... but one thing is playing a demo, and another is being able to start a game. With that in mind, we arrive at the blog of the famous Adafruit portal, where they've just shared their adventures with a Doom port on a QT Py ESP32 Pico device, which includes a 1.3-inch screen, audio output, and a GPIO expander to control up to ten buttons...
Several months ago we watched Doom Eternal on the world's smallest monitor. The HDMI input on that module helped simplify things, and the Doomslayer needed the firepower of a complete computer to display his skills. Now, what is the smallest device on which we can start a game of Doom, without depending on external hardware? The first thing that comes to mind is Doom on a Game & Watch, but today we come across another candidate for the title: Adafruit's QT Py ESP32 Pico device, with a 1.3-inch screen.
Playing Doom... in Less Than Two Inches
The QT Py ESP32 Pico is a very interesting little device: As its name suggests, it is based on an ESP32 Pico module with two Tensilica cores at 240 MHz, 2 megabytes of PSRAM (that is pseudo-static RAM), and 8 megabytes of Flash storage. The 1.3-inch TFT screen can display a total of 240 by 240 pixels, and under the rest of the specifications we find a microSD slot, accompanied by an AW9523 GPIO expander, which also works as an LED driver.
On the software side, what the Adafruit team did was create a Retro-Go port, a retro-emulation platform compatible with ESP32 devices (official support is for the ODROID-GO series). Retro-Go also includes a PrBoom port for ESP32, so the last step was just to load the classic DOOM1.WAD from the microSD card.
The best part is that Retro-Go is not limited to running Doom: Being an emulator, it can run games for NES, Game Boy and Game Boy Color (Nintendo), Master System, SG-1000 and Game Gear (Sega), Colecovision, PC Engine, and Atari Lynx. From what I've been able to find out, the QT Py ESP32 Pico is not yet available to the public, but I imagine clones won't take long to appear.
Official site: Click here
