Adafruit Creates a Tiny Handheld Device for Playing Doom

There are many surprising devices the 1993 video game Doom can run on, but open source hardware company Adafruit created a tiny handheld device specifically to run the game. It's called the Adafruit QT Py Doom, and Adafruit thinks it might be the "smallest playable Doom device."

The tiny portable (which is very reminiscent of the Arduboy) is still at the prototype stage, but it already plays Doom at full speed and looks easy to control even though the buttons are so small.

The hardware used includes an ESP32 Pico v3.02 module with a dual-core processors running at 240MHz, 2MB of PSRAM, and 8MB of flash storage. The display is a 1.3-inch TFT IPS panel with a resolution of 240-by-240 pixels, and as the video shows, the game output and text is crisp and easy to read.

Adafruit also managed to include 10 buttons, a microSD card slot, and the ability to plug in headphones for audio. As for the game, it's a port of PrBoom running through Retro-Go emulation. The DOOM1.WAD is loaded from a microSD card and the software does the rest.

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As it's just a prototype, there's no word on price or what the final version of the Doom player will look like. Adafruit is hoping to get both John Romero and John Carmack to share their thoughts on the device and "we’ll offer to send them one each, the first couple units!"

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