In context: People have run versions of Doom on everything from inkjet printers to Apple's Touch Bar. Now, you can play the game on a tiny Lego brick that acts as an external monitor and a rudimentary controller. The components involved are also very affordable, making it easy to try to recreate the project.
A Twitter user showed off a custom Lego brick containing a tiny display and then proceeded to play Doom on it. The 0.42-inch monochrome OLED screen features a resolution of 72x40, barely enough to see what's happening in-game.
The hollowed-out blue brick also contains an STM32F030F4P6 microcontroller with a single-core ARM Cortex-M0 running at 48 MHz, 4 KB of RAM, and 16 KB of flash storage. This hardware is required to drive the display, and it's not enough to run Doom by itself, with some sprites within the game taking up more space than 16 KB.
I wired the brick up as a very small external monitor, so you can, for instance, play Doom on it. pic.twitter.com/uWK2Uw7Egr
— James Brown (@ancient_james) June 19, 2022
Instead, the Lego brick acts as a small external display, with a PC offscreen rendering Doom and running a Python script for dithering and resizing. The creator even added capacitive touch controls to the two studs on top, allowing you to turn in-game.
In case you're looking to recreate the peculiar project, the user has created a Twitter thread where he explains the process in detail.
id Software originally released Doom on MS-DOS almost 30 years ago. Since then, the company has ported it to dozens of other platforms and consoles. People also started unofficially porting the game to countless esoteric devices, such as thermostats, oscilloscopes, McDonald's cash registers, Ikea smart lamps, and even a Porsche 911.
https://www.techspot.com/news/95028-you-can-now-play-doom-lego-piece.html
