Photo credit: Next-Hack
We’ve seen toasters, a pregnancy test, and now, an IKEA TRÅDFRI LED1923R5 lamp run DOOM, but is it playable? Believe it or not, this home appliance is powered by a 96 + 12 kB of RAM (108 kB in total), 1MB of Flash, and an 80MHz Cortex M33 processor, making it perfect to run Doomhack’s open source Doom port to Game Boy Advance (GBA), based on PrBoom. To make this possible, they needed to also install a 1.8-inch TFT 160×128 SPI display running the ILI9163 / ST7735S controller.
As you can see in the demo, the team not only succeeded in this challenge, but they also completed all the optional points, i.e. being able to play the full shareware levels, keeping all of Doom’s engine features, and even restoring Z-depth light as well as audio. Plus, this port can be used as base for any other microcontroller featuring a limited amount of RAM.
We think we have still some room of improvement, both in terms of performance and RAM usage. We need also to improve the status bar. As for now, it is just a zoomed-out version of the GBA port status bar, small text is not readable, and the face aspect ration is wrong. Furthermore, a nice thing might be using a round display… we shall see in the future!,” said its creators.
