It Turns Out You Can Play ‘Doom’ on Almost Anything — Even a Lightning to HDMI Adapter
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I’ve always heard that it’s possible to run the classic first-person shooter Doom on nearly any kind of hardware. That now includes Apple’s Lightning to HDMI adapter cable.
In a video posted on February 2 and first shared by MacRumors, developer nyan_satan demonstrated a port of the classic first-person shooter video game Doom running on Apple’s Lightning to HDMI adapter. Yes, an adapter cable.
You might think an adapter has no computing power, and usually, you’d be correct. However, the Lightning to HDMI adapter features a dedicated system-on-a-chip with a processor inside. The adapter runs a stripped-down, very basic version of iOS, intended only to process video signals and nothing else.
As you might imagine, getting Doom to run on Apple’s adapter was no easy task, even if the game debuted in 1993 for what would today be severely underpowered DOS-based PCs. Apple places tight feature restrictions on its accessories to prevent them from being used for anything other than their intended purpose. It should be noted that audio and video output occurred on a connected Mac.
For those who don’t know what Doom is, it’s a first-person shooter game developed and published by ID Software. Players assume the role of a space marine, unofficially referred to by many players as “Doomguy,” who must fight hordes of undead humans and invading demons, beginning on the moons of Mars and finishing in Hell (yes, THE Hell), fighting through each level until they find the level’s exit or they defeat its final boss.
Doom was both a critical and commercial success, quickly earning a reputation as one of the best video games of all time. The game sold an estimated 3.5 million copies by 1999, and up to 20 million people are believed to have played it within two years of its launch.
Doom has been ported to a variety of platforms, including computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. The game has spawned not only demos but several sequels, including Doom II (1994), Doom 64 (1997), Doom 3 (2004), Doom (2016), Doom Eternal (2020), and even Doom: The Dark Ages this year. The game has also inspired two films Doom (2005) and Doom: Annihilation (2019), but the less said about those, the better.
This certainly doesn’t mark the first time an inventive programmer has managed to get Doom running on an unusual device. Developers are somewhat infatuated with getting the game to run on unusual hardware, even devices and accessories that were never meant to run games. So far, the game has been made to run on smart home devices like refrigerators, the Google Search bar, and even Microsoft Word.
The game has even been made to run inside a PDF document, in Visual Studio Code IDE rendered as alphabet characters in an open tab, a pharmacy cross LED sign, and on a toothbrush display over WiFi.
In 2016, Facebook engineer Adam Bell managed to run the classic game on the MacBook Pro of the time’s Touch Bar’s OLED display. The Touch Bar was a touch-sensitive display strip designed to replace the function keys on the MacBook Pro, and developers could customize the touch bar to include features for their apps.
