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Doom Running on an IKEA Lamp [video]
- kregasaurusrex 5y agoThe creator posted a full write-up here: https://next-hack.com/index.php/2021/06/12/lets-port-doom-to-an-ikea-tradfri-lamp/ https://next-hack.com/index.php/2021/06/12/lets-port-doom-to...
- accountofme 5y agoExcuse the swearing: but pretty fucking cool.
- etrautmann 5y agoWhat an awesome project. I need to update my intuitions a bit
- chews 5y agoGolf clap good human!
- nabaraz 5y agoReminds me of Ship of Theseus. "If you replace all the parts of a ship is it still the same ship?". This project is equivalent to "Doom running on 40-MHz Cortex M4 found in Ikea lamps". Good work nevertheless!
- discardable_dan 5y agoAgreed. The actual lamp isn't... the thing. It's just reusing a chip with a monitor.
- dspillett 5y agoMaybe this could be a new take on "a modern pocket calculator has far more computing power than the moon landing systems in '69". A modern lavalamp has as much computing power as my mid 90s desktop PC.
- colonwqbang 5y agoA playstation doesn't have a monitor, controller, loudspeaker etc. built in. It's all external stuff you have to plug in before you can play. Still, we say "I'm playing Doom on my playstation".
- SiempreViernes 5y agoYou also say you are "playing video games on my playstation" which doesn't make much technical sense, so clearly appeals to common idioms aren't without problems. In any case, the argument is that the mini console they built is no longer a lamp, not that you can't play games on a console.
- squeaky-clean 5y agoEhhhh. Those things are meant to plug right in. I've never had to solder together my own breakout board and carrier board to hook a Playstation up to a TV while breaking the Playstation's main features in the process. That lightbulb is completely disassembled and won't function as a lightbulb anymore. And nothing they added was plug-n-play. Edit: It's still a fun and cool project. But more like running Doom on hardware salvaged from an IKEA lamp.
- danellis 5y agoYeah, "Game that ran on an 8MHz Arm in 1993 running on a 40MHz Arm in 2021" wouldn't have been as attention-grabbing.
- loritorto 5y ago* "Game that ran in a 486 @ 66 MHz (for the same fps), with 4 MB RAM in 1993 running on a 80 MHz Cortex M33, with 0.108 MB RAM"
- peoplefromibiza 5y agotbf they ported a low RAM version, specifically the GBA version, not the original one. So the OP is not entirely wrong: they ported a game played on a 16.8Mhz system with 256kb of RAM to a 80Mhz with 108Kb of RAM. The writeup explicitly says «we could trade off some computing power of the 80Mhz Cortex M33 to save memory»
- pigeck 5y agoStill the original Doom features are all there, except multiplayer. They also restored some missing graphics features of the GBA port, like z-depth lighting. Yes 4MB vs 108kB is more impressive than 256k vs 108k, but cutting in half the memory requirements is still notewhorty.
- dolmen 5y agoSo a port of a port isn't a port?
- Narishma 5y agoAt a quarter the resolution.
- loritorto 5y agoI think that the goal of the project is not "Doom running on a 40-Cortex M4" (actually an 80 M33...), which is pretty easy I guess, but "Doom running with only 108 kB of RAM", while keeping all the features (which is pretty hard, I guess). I recall that I had to bend over backwards to get it running on my 386 with only 4MB RAM.
- audunw 5y agoThe game is cheating a little bit, since it loads a lot of read-only data from external SPI flash memory, and all the code is in the internal 1MB flash. On your 386, everything including the OS had to fit on that 4MB RAM. It also doesn't have quite all the features. No music, and no screen wipe effect (I worked on a memory constrained Doom port myself, and that silly little effect is incredibly memory intensive since you need two full copies of the frame buffer)
- jonas21 5y agoI think it's fair to say they're playing Doom on the lamp (and even more impressively, it's not a whole lamp, but just a light bulb!). They use an external keyboard, monitor, speakers, and storage for the game data, but the processor and RAM are from the original bulb. If someone said "I'm playing Doom on my PC" in 1993, they would also have been using an external keyboard, monitor, and speakers. And the game would have shipped on external storage (floppy disks).
- Fatalist_ma 5y agoBefore clicking I assumed the lamp had a small screen and they were using that screen...
- Aeronwen 5y agoWas hoping they stuck the light behind a Nipkow Disk. I didn't really expect it to happen, but I still want to see it.
- squeaky-clean 5y agoI was hoping to see them running a 1-pixel version of doom on an RGB bulb.
- loritorto 5y agoActually, the correct technical term for "lightbulb" is "lamp", and the correct term for "lamp" is "fixture" :)
- midasuni 5y agoMaybe in your language, but looking at my English dictionary it clearly says a lamp is a device for jibing light consisting of a bulb, holder and shade. Historically a lamp would consist of the wick, oil and holder.
- loritorto 5y agoFrom wikipedia (Electric light): " In technical usage, a replaceable component that produces light from electricity is called a lamp." EDIT: Yes, later in the same page: "Lamps are commonly called light bulbs;"
- user3939382 5y agoThanks for the reference. I’ve pondered this for many years in the context of sports teams. If you can replace all the players, owners, coaches, logo, stadium, etc.. what are you really a fan of?
- ralmidani 5y agoIs it fair to say “anything that can run Doom, eventually will run Doom”?
- dhosek 5y agoBack in the 80s/90s there were some questionable ports of TeX do unlikely hardware. Perhaps the most egregious of these was TeX running on a Cray supercomputer. Time on these machines was metered heavily. I can't imagine anyone actually used it for formatting papers. I had a dream of doing a hand port of TeX to 6502 assembly to see if I could get it running on a 128K Apple //e. I envisioned heavy use of bank switching to enable code to jump back and forth between the two 64KB banks which could only be switched in predefined blocks as I recall (the page 1/2 text/lores blocks, page 1/2 hires blocks, the high 16k and I think the low 48k that wasn't part of the lores/hires blocks but it's a long time since I played with that hardware.
- bombcar 5y ago128k seems at least in the same ballpark as the PDP-10 so it should be possible - especially if disk is available.
- peterburkimsher 5y agoAnother guy got Doom running on potatoes, so I'd say yes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFDlVgBMomQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFDlVgBMomQ
- grecy 5y agoWhen I worked at the Department of Defence I got Quake III running on a monster SGI supercomputer that was somewhere around the $5mil mark.
- eloisius 5y agoAnd people talk about $500 hammers…
- 5y ago
- kencausey 5y agoSo, why does this device need such processing power? Can this really be cost effective?
- eru 5y agoBy today's standard Doom doesn't need much processing power. You could probably find exactly the right chip that only has exactly just as many bits of RAM as you need for the lamp's functionality. But that would probably be more expensive to develop and chip than just using standard parts? Even more radical: I suspect with a bit of cleverness you could probably do everything the lamp needs to do with some relays and transistors. But today, that would be more expensive. Compare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmGaXEmfTIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmGaXEmfTIo for the latter approach.
- jfrunyon 5y agoImplementing wifi/RF with "some relays and transistors" doesn't sound fun.
- moftz 5y agoYou could do something very basic with discrete components for controlling wireless lighting systems but system starts to get out of hand when you need to have a bunch of lights nearby. It's much cheaper, simpler, and smaller to reduce it down to a chip and move to a digital RF system. I've got a bunch of RF controlled outlets in my house but it's just about the dumbest system you can buy. It's on par with the typical remote garage door opener. You can program the on/off buttons on the remote for each outlet but that's as far as it goes. I'd like to be able to remotely control them away from home or be able to give each light or outlet its own schedule and that requires either a central controller or each device having network access for network time and remote control. Interestingly, a friend rented a house in college once that had a system of low voltage light switches that ran back to a cabinet filled with relays that controlled light switches and outlets. No major benefit to the user other than a control panel in the master bedroom that lets you control the exterior and some interior lights. It was a neat system but definitely outdated. I'd imagine a retrofit would be to drop all of the relays for solid state and provide a networked controller to monitor status and provide remote control.
- remarkEon 5y agoThese are always awesome and I never stop being impressed by what folks can do. What's left in the world for "DOOM running on ____"? Here's my idea: Could we do this with a drone swarm? And have players still control DOOM guy somehow? I'm imagining sitting on the beach at night and someone is playing a level while everyone looks up at the sky at a massive "screen".
- Out_of_Characte 5y agoThe current world record for drones is ~1300, 320*200 resolution has 50 times more pixels than drones. Therefore you need is powerfull 8-bit color drones and someone to design good edge representation. or just have massive fleet for better resolution. https://www.airlineratings.com/news/art-sky-check-spectacular-drone-displays/ https://www.airlineratings.com/news/art-sky-check-spectacula...
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoThey've been playing Tetris and Snake on some weird things already (I've seen Tetris on a high rise, and Snake on a christmas tree)
- masswerk 5y agoWhat about a swarm of pigeons? Three RFCs can't be wrong… [0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149 [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2549 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2549 [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6214 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6214
- 5y ago
- aninteger 5y ago"Of course it runs Doom" Nice work!
- stuntkite 5y agoWith the chip shortage, you best believe some people are going to be buying some of these to scavenge for project parts.
- kwdc 5y agoIs there a PCB shortage as well? I feel like that couid put a dampener on the proceedings. Asking for a friend.
- stuntkite 5y agoI mean maybe? I don't think it's that consiquential for hobbyists as the lack of microcontrollers or other components. For instance, I can electroplate quite a few different substrates if I want to cut my own boards. Also after years of doing this, I have so much proto crap I'm probably good till the next pandemic but probably only have a couple unused Teensys and maybe an arduino or two laying around. I don't see the supply chain ever springing back to what it was. We are in a whole new world of scarcity for at least a few years IMO. Which I'm not that upset about at all really. It's inconvenient and possibly dangerous but I think the reorganization will create resilience in our supply chains and also the lack of gear will encourage people to do very interesting things with stuff that would be considered trash in 2019 and we need more of that. E-Waste is a huge problem.
- mschuster91 5y ago> I don't see the supply chain ever springing back to what it was. We are in a whole new world of scarcity for at least a few years IMO. The current issues are driven by the automotive industry having screwed up and shitcoin miners snatching up GPUs. Neither is going to be a long term issue.
- varjag 5y agoIt's more than that, supply chain issues started around 2016.
- 5y ago
- winrid 5y agoThis is just the case, right? None of the internals (chip, screen) are from the lamp?
- icelancer 5y agoNo, the chips and internals are from the bulb. The screen obviously is not.
- winrid 5y agoAwesome that a light has 100mb of ram, if I remember from the video correctly.
- alkonaut 5y agoAgree it should be able to run on a 1x1 resolution (the lamp) and no audio, out of the box. It wouldn’t be a very cool video though.
- grillvogel 5y agokinda lame tbh
- systemvoltage 5y agoConstrained resources often lead to exceptionally brilliant software. It’s as if resource constraints inspire a form of discipline and frugality that’s demanded from us. We become acutely aware of it, and reprimand our brains from complacency. From Apollo program to today’s Internet-of-Shit, somewhere we lost our ability to focus and bloated ourselves with sugar-high of processing power and memory. Just because it exists, and is cheap, doesn’t mean it’s good for you.
- runawaybottle 5y agoConstraints is the mother of all creativity. Like Andy Dufresne and the the rock hammer, how about I give you nothing, could you possibly dig your way out?
- Jare 5y agoCreativity would ensue, success probably not.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- croes 5y agoNext step, can it run Crysis?
- int_19h 5y agoDoom was released in 1993, so 28 years ago. Crysis was released in 2007, so ... maybe in 2035?
- optimalsolver 5y agoReminds me of this comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-17 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-17
- pwagland 5y agoSMBC is starting to reach parity with XKCD… between the two of them there really _should_ be a comic for everything!
- HugoDaniel 5y agothe pregnancy test doom was fake! :O
- abluecloud 5y agoit wasn't fake as much as misreported.
- DudeInBasement 5y agoUnderrated
- djmips 5y agoThe author helped that along.
- djmips 5y agoThis one is fake for me too since they had to add a screen and other stuff. Meh, I prefer my Doom runs on X to mean that X wasn't modified or beefed up.
- baybal2 5y agoThat a very powerful lightbulb! It has more CPU perf than my first computer, and costs 1000 times less at the same time. The progress of semiconductor industry is fantastical.
- teekert 5y agoWe should all take some time to consider that our light bubs have more powerful computers than the first computer many of us once owned. This perspective makes scifi stuff like "smart dust" seem a lot more feasible. Ubiquitous computing, what will it bring us?
- Angostura 5y agoI always like the fact that the average musical birthday card, popular in the 90s had more compute capacity than the computer in the Apollo command module.
- Eduard 5y agoI doubt.
- nl 5y agohttps://hackaday.com/2011/11/22/musical-greeting-card-with-minimal-parts/ https://hackaday.com/2011/11/22/musical-greeting-card-with-m... shows building a music card on an ATTiny 85. These are around 20 MIPS. The Apollo guidence computer had around 1 MIPS.
- kolinko 5y agoYou can build a music card on ATTiny, but music cards didn’t use ATTiny.
- vmception 5y agoThat was entertaining
- timonoko 5y agoFake News (Just a little bit). I was just thinking about using unmodified lamp as a Linux Terminal. I learned morse in the army in 70's. I already had a lamp which morsed time of day, but it was annoying, because morse numbers are so long.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- beebeepka 5y agoLamp, the final frontier. What now, you might ask. Well, RGB brain implants running Quake, of course.
- quickthrower2 5y agoBut can it run Slack?
- bayesian_horse 5y agoTruly a light bulb moment.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoA corollary of Moores Law: the size of things you can run Doom on halves roughly every two years.
- bognition 5y agoCarmack's law?
- sireat 5y agoThis was a nice porting job! https://www.reddit.com/r/itrunsdoom/ https://www.reddit.com/r/itrunsdoom/ - could use some new content. Next level would be finding the cheapest modern mass produced device that can run Doom with no hardware modifications. This means use whatever I/O the device comes with for controller and display. Using external display sort of distracts from the coolness. Second part - it has to be currently in production(like this Ikea lamp). I mean you can find a $10 device/computer from 10 years ago that will run Doom.
- djmips 5y agoI agree, adding a display and other mods isn't so impressive. They might as well order the microprocessor board from the manufacturer.
- blauditore 5y agoOnly tangentially related, but has been bothering me: How does a simple rechargable bicycle light cost $20 upwards? - It can't be about chip/logic, as that's a commodity these days (as this post celebretes). - It can't be LEDs, because they are dirt cheap too, especially red ones. - Building the plastic case doesn't seem to warrant such a high price. - The battery needs very little capacity, magnitudes lower than e.g. that of a phone. - Is it maybe the charging mechanism through USB? Are there some crazy patent fees?
- rwmj 5y agoThe price of something isn't (usually) the cost of the parts + a profit margin. There's a whole theory behind pricing.
- lddemi 5y ago"rechargeable bike light" on aliexpress (hell even amazon) yields several significantly below $20 options.
- webinvest 5y agoIt costs $20 and up because somebody priced it at $20 and up.
- Ekaros 5y agoBecause they can charge that much? Actually, I find funny that the traditional solution of light and dynamo is 6€+5€ shipping+taxes...
- spython 5y agoThe bike lights that cost 15-20 € in Europe cost 2-5€ in bulk on alibaba. Literally the same model. I guess it's mostly shipping, import duties, taxes, marketplace fees, free shipping to customer, returns handling and profit margin.
- chasd00 5y agothe price will be what the market will bear. How could it be otherwise?
- 5y ago
- clownpenis_fart 5y agowow who would have believed that doom could be easily ported to any sufficiently powerful cpu+framebuffer hardware
- intricatedetail 5y agoThis is what you have to do if you run out of chips.
- ravenstine 5y agoWow, it runs even better on that lamp than it did when I installed it on my iPod! (using Linux)
- wonks 5y agoHas the "running DOOM" meme gone too far?
- phkahler 5y agoNo.
- linuxhansl 5y ago"Only 108kb of ram." That quote reminded me of my first computer: The ZX81, which had 1kb of RAM! About 150 bytes of that was used by system variables, and depending on how you use the screen up to 768 bytes are used by the display buffer. And yet I managed to write code on it as a kid. :) (Of course nothing like Doom)
- RosanaAnaDana 5y agoWe were so busy wondering if it could be done, we never stopped to ask if it should be done. Will the future forgive us?
- swiley 5y agoYou can get absolutely tiny chips (maybe 4x the area of the shadow of a ball-point pen ball) that can run Linux for ~$1. Computers in IoT cost nothing unless you need to do graphics or run electron/Ml.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoLet's make a fortune by making lamp crypto malware. Who's down? How do I type IDSPISPOPD on this thing?
- roudaki 5y agoI know this sounds crazy now but with improving brain computer interfaces, and I know it is not as good as they say, in a couple years maybe lets say 20 someone will run Doom on that brain implant. We all know we will see this during lifetime. I mean, you can buy in a shop right now a device that helps you control your pc with your brain waves. How is that not exciting? Is it amazing to be a science nerd?
- aasasd 5y agoIt's a relief to see something other than ‘Doom running on a cinematograph projector’ where the device only acts as the video output.
- ck2 5y agoKinda disappointed to see no-one has backported Doom to a TRS-80 (yet) but that's probably asking a bit too much. The pregnacy-test-kit running Doom was fake? Somehow missed all the front-page retractions on that one.
- wildpeaks 5y agoBoth the video and the write-up appear to be gone? Did IKEA complain?
- 1m2r3a 5y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20210615035229/https://next-hack.com/index.php/2021/06/12/lets-port-doom-to-an-ikea-tradfri-lamp/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210615035229/https://next-hack...
- v4rp1ng 5y agoThe video is now private, did someone upload it somewhere else?
- trzeci 5y agoLooks like the article and video was pulled down : (
- kregasaurusrex 5y agoI'm curious as to why it was taken down too- the video, blog post, and Github repo are all gone. Here's a mirror to the original: https://archive.is/JguQH https://archive.is/JguQH
- andredz 5y agoThe video, and the write-up (https://next-hack.com/index.php/2021/06/12/lets-port-doom-to-an-ikea-tradfri-lamp/ https://next-hack.com/index.php/2021/06/12/lets-port-doom-to...) seem to be unavailable.
- alexweber 5y agoHere's a mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20210615035229/https://next-hack.com/index.php/2021/06/12/lets-port-doom-to-an-ikea-tradfri-lamp/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210615035229/https://next-hack...
- stefap2 5y agoLooks like it was hidden now.
- detaro 5y agoand the blog post also removed. weird.