The Original 'DOOM' Can Run on a Calculator Powered by 100 Pounds of Potatoes
It’ll only take you 700 slices.
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.
