Wow! These days, it's hard to be surprised by someone getting Doom to run on another obscure device that was never meant for the task. It has almost become a cliché, but to Doom modders it's just a Tuesday. Now we can add orbiting satellites to the list of weird things that can run the game.
Last year, a team of software and aerospace engineers took Doom porting to the next level, getting the game to run on a satellite orbiting Earth. It took some out-of-the-box thinking and tweaking, but they eventually got it playing (without graphics). Of course, since "pics or it didn't happen" applies, they had to bump up their game even more to render some screenshots that used pictures of Earth taken by the satellite as the game's backdrops.
Norwegian software engineer Ólafur Waage relayed the story recently at Ubuntu Summit 25.10 (below). Waage had been working on porting Doom from C to C++ when Georges Labrèche, a spacecraft operations engineer at the European Space Agency, reached out. Labrèche wondered: could they get Doom running on ESA's OP-SAT satellite, a suitcase-sized experimental platform orbiting the planet? Waage admitted that he was no Doom expert, but noted that he'd be crazy to pass on such an opportunity.
The OP-SAT spacecraft is about as far away from a gaming console as one can get, both figuratively and literally. It consists primarily of off-the-shelf computer parts – specifically an Altera Cyclone 5 and an ARM dual-core Cortex A9 – packed into a compact box orbiting hundreds of kilometers above the Earth.
The OP-SAT platform is an open laboratory, meaning that researchers and scientists can rent time to run experiments. Running Doom on it was quite unorthodox compared to the typical highly scientific applications the satellite usually handles. It required patience, ingenuity, and a healthy respect for orbital safety protocols.
At first, the team got the game running with no graphics to prove the onboard system could perform the calculations. Then came the real headache: getting actual graphics to display, in software-rendered mode, and swapping out Doom's fictional skybox for images of Earth.
Producing screenshots or what was essentially machine code output was not so straightforward as tweaking it to run on alien hardware (pun totally intended). Doom's stubborn 256-color palette is not great at blending the satellite's higher fidelity images into the game's skybox. The engineers used a machine learning algorithm to adjust the colors to look just right.
At the end of the day, they were able to produce some decent screenshots, but it was hit-and-miss thanks to the unpredictable and uncontrollable timing of the spacecraft's camera. However, it did qualify it as another absurd milestone in the long, weird history of Doom ports that include such unlikely suspects as PDF documents and portable power banks.
They got Doom running on a satellite orbiting Earth, because of course they did
