Hacker Gets Doom Run…
Doom has already been modified to run on everything from a pregnancy test to an e-reader and a smart refrigerator. Now a vape has joined the list.
The hardware hacker and software developer Aaron Christophel has published a video, showing the classic PC game running on a $30 vape.
The Aspire Pixo Kit is different from other vapes in that the device contains a 1.5-inch color touchscreen. Christophel also discovered the Pixo contains its own CPU in the Puxa PY32F403XC 32-bit Arm chip.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t run natively on the vape. Instead, it’s essentially streaming Doom from a PC to the Pixo Kit through a USB cable. To do so, Christophel created a custom firmware for the vape to enable the screen-sharing, which occurs at about 6 frames per seconds.
In the video, you can see the vape is connected to a USB cable. Christophel then proceeds to play the game via mouse while also showing how the vape can become a “secondary monitor” to run other videos from the connected PC.
“While it can not directly play DOOM, by utilizing the USB Connection and its Display we can use a screen-share cheat to hack DOOM onto the Vape,” he wrote on a GitHub page, featuring the project and the custom firmware.
As for why he couldn’t run Doom directly over the vape, Christophel said in a tweet that the Pixo Kit doesn’t have enough RAM to pull this off. The vape itself only has 64KB of RAM when the original Doom game needs 4MB. Still, Christophel’s tweet teases he might try to run the game natively in the future with another mod.
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Michael Kan
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I’ve been a journalist for over 15 years. I got my start as a schools and cities reporter in Kansas City and joined PCMag in 2017, where I cover satellite internet services, cybersecurity, PC hardware, and more. I’m currently based in San Francisco, but previously spent over five years in China, covering the country’s technology sector.
Since 2020, I’ve covered the launch and explosive growth of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service, writing 600+ stories on availability and feature launches, but also the regulatory battles over the expansion of satellite constellations, fights with rival providers like AST SpaceMobile and Amazon, and the effort to expand into satellite-based mobile service. I’ve combed through FCC filings for the latest news and driven to remote corners of California to test Starlink’s cellular service.
I also cover cyber threats, from ransomware gangs to the emergence of AI-based malware. Earlier this year, the FTC forced Avast to pay consumers $16.5 million for secretly harvesting and selling their personal information to third-party clients, as revealed in my joint investigation with Motherboard.
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