Doom, a first-person shooter game for Windows, has now been ported to the Raspberry Pi Pico, a device with only 2MB of flash memory.
Doom, a classic MS-DOS game from the 1990s, has been ported to Windows, Linux, and nearly every operating system, device, and platform known to man. The Pi Pico has now been included to the list.
Last January, Raspberry Pi announced the Pico, a microcontroller powered by the Raspberry Pi's RP2040, for $4 each. The Pi Pico comes with 2MB of flash memory, but the RP2040 can hold up to 16MB. The business is currently selling reels of the RP2040 chips for $1 to 70c each.
Graham Sanderson, a primary software developer at Raspberry Pi who has been leading software activities behind the RP2040 and Pico's software development kit, has created a new Doom version for Pico (SDK).
He's also been working on a Pico port of the PC version of Doom, and he's shared a few videos of it in action, complete with full audio and a VGA-connected display.
Sanderson concedes that the RP2040 isn't the smallest platform Doom has been translated to, but it is perhaps the cheapest, in a blog post detailing his progress on Doom for RP2040.
There was a simpler Game Boy Advance version running on Pico, as Raspberry Pi chief Even Upton points out, but Sanderson's implementation plays the original shareware DOOM1. Files in the WAD format -. WAD is a Doom on PC file format that includes the original audio. Doom for the Pico offers four-player network games over I2C.
Sanderson crammed the executable plus a compressed version of the 4MB DOOM1.WAD shareware game onto the Pico's 2MB flash memory.
