From Notepad to an ultrasound scanner, passing through a Lego brick, a computer's BIOS and a pregnancy test, almost anything can run or play a quick session of Doom. However, "DOS Storm" on YouTube decided to explore another facet of Doom: the use of alternative controls to take down demonic hordes. In this case, an electric guitar!
The original Doom configuration allows us to play using only the keyboard, but the most effective way to “clean out” the infernal trash is with the combination of keyboard and mouse. Even so, the “experimental condition” that the game is going through these days has given rise to the Doomguy on arcade machines and handhelds like the Game & Watch, with all the challenges its interfaces generate. So what if we take that to an extreme? The answer is on the DOS Storm YouTube channel, which shows us the process of playing Doom with an electric guitar.
An electric guitar to play Doom
The trained eye has probably already recognized it, but the guitar is a Schecter Hellraiser Deluxe, with a very appropriate name for the occasion. In theory, each note coming from the guitar could be configured as a command or a button, but here the first detail arises: the signals are analog. The analog-to-digital conversion is carried out with the help of Dodo MIDI 2, a free MIDI plugin compatible with DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) like Reaper.
The second half of the process requires two additional applications. One is loopMIDI, which creates a virtual MIDI device to take all MIDI data from the DAW and send it to a specific program. The other is MIDIKey2Key, which takes care of converting the final MIDI information into key presses. MIDIKey2Key requires a complete manual configuration, and the registration of each note in hexadecimal value.
Logically, beating E1M1 with a guitar is a real torture. Each note is barely a pulse, and the latency is much larger than expected. I think DOS Storm's main mistake was using DOSBox to run Doom. In fact, his entire environment crashed several times, and he was forced to restart the computer. I imagine that a modern port like Chocolate Doom should help improve stability and performance, but he still managed to finish the first level… in just over seven minutes. Not even the potato guy dared that much.
