The Original 'DOOM' Can Run on a Calculator Powered by 100 Pounds of Potatoes

With 30 years under its belt and countless sequels, spinoffs and remakes, you may have played some form of DOOM on a handful of platforms, but one device you’ve probably never imagined to play it on is a calculator. This didn’t stop YouTuber Equalo, who managed to get the original 1993 version of the game running on a graphical calculator. What’s more amazing is that it wasn’t just any calculator — it was powered by 100 pounds of potatoes.

Over the course of a 17-minute video (which you can watch above), Equalo points out that other hackers and creators out there have managed to get DOOM running on every platform imaginable, like a car’s infotainment system controlled via the vehicle’s actual mechanical inputs, such as braking, accelerating, turning the steering wheel, and honking. Someone else even got it to run on a pregnancy test. “While I’m not sure I have the technical skill or the patience to figure out how to run it on either of these devices, I decided to try a challenge of my own: I was going to get DOOM running powered entirely by potatoes.”

As you’ll see over the course of the clip, the end result has him boiling down a staggering 100 pounds of potatoes with over 700 slices to generate more than 100 milliamps and five volts of current for him to power a TI-84 graphical calculator, which ultimately managed to run a rudimentary yet impressive version of the hit demon-slaying shooter. “Please don’t ever try to do this yourself,” he says at the end of the video. “It’s not worth it.”

In other gaming-related news, SEGA has created a free-to-play mashup of Yakuza and Streets of Rage 2.