Doom Now Playable on Nintendo’s $99 Alarm Clock: The Shores of Bell

Recently, a Twitter user going by GaryOderNichts accomplished an unusual feat: they hacked Nintendo’s Alarmo alarm clock to run the shareware version of Doom. Enthusiastically sharing their progress, Gary posted a video of this unique achievement on Twitter earlier this week.

Gary explained in a series of tweets that, although there’s currently no sound, the Doom shareware .wad file needs some compression trickery. By compressing and then decompressing it upon startup, they managed to bypass the USB loader’s memory size limitation. Intriguingly, if you’re inclined to try this yourself, you won’t need to physically modify your Alarmo clock. Gary has made all project files publicly available on GitHub for anyone curious enough to experiment.

Curious about how this is done? Gary provided a detailed blog post outlining the entire process. The hacking adventure began by dissecting the Alarmo to understand its internal mechanisms. The heart of the system is an STM32H730ZBI6 Arm Cortex-M7 processor, a well-documented piece of tech. This knowledge allowed Gary to bridge their Raspberry Pi with the Nintendo Alarmo.

In an amusing Twitter update, Gary expressed, “After my last post, it was pretty clear what everyone wanted to see on the Alarmo. So, here it is – Doom running on the Nintendo Alarmo!”

While Gary initially had to solder and tweak to get things rolling, the final version available on GitHub has been simplified, sidestepping the need for any hardware modifications on the Alarmo itself to load Doom via USB.

Navigating Doom through the Nintendo Alarmo involves using the top controls, which include a pair of buttons and a multifunctional touch dial. Here, you can swipe to look around, while a button on the lower right triggers the shooting action. The demo footage, showcasing an early level of Doom, doesn’t reveal much about the other controls, leaving viewers to speculate on their functionality.

It’s quirky enough that a $99 Nintendo alarm clock can run Doom, but this isn’t the only peculiar piece of tech that’s been used for such a purpose. Doom’s legacy of adaptability has seen it played on devices from a smart lawnmower to the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 microcontroller, an air hockey table, and even through an expansion card crafted for the vintage Commodore 64.

For fans of such tech oddities, this project offers yet another testament to the enduring versatility and constant ingenuity surrounding Doom, reimagined time and again on platforms no one expected.