From pianos and ATM machines to a battery farm of potatoes, it seems Doom will run on just about anything these days. It's completely unsurprising, then, that someone got the venerable FPS working on Nintendo's nostalgic Game & Watch alarm clock.
Look at it. It's got a screen and some buttons. That's practically an overqualification.
Released earlier this year, Nintendo's Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. is a throwback to the company's first handheld. But where that toy was a simple screen with a few changeable elements, its 2020 successor is a fully functional console-slash-alarm-clock, packaged as it is with two full Mario games.
Naturally, hardware hacking channel Stacksmashing took the thing apart to see what else the teeny piece of kit could run. There was, of course, only one answer.
"After I posted my last video about hacking the new Nintendo Game & Watch, the people [...] made one thing very clear: The Game & Watch has to run Doom."
The six-minute vid is largely a technical dive into the hurdles faced in trying to get Doom (and, er, other things) running on the seriously underpowered gizmo. As always, the familiar FPS has to contort itself to fit on a new device—and while it loses sound effects and many environmental textures in the process, Stacksmashing does eventually get Doom running at a pretty respectable framerate.
If you've got a bit of time to tinker, you can grab the full source code from the channel's Github page. They plan to get more homebrew software working on the device in future—but personally, I hope they manage to integrate Doom with the Game & Watch's existing alarm clock functionality.
After all, what'd wake me up more than the bloody screams of a demonic assault?
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