The original 1993 Doom has become a sort of challenge for programmers. Many have gotten the game to run on things that you’d normally not associate with it directly, like pregnancy test kits, Twitter, or even within other games. Pushing the envelope on the “port Doom to everything” challenge now brings it to the simple text editor, Windows Notepad.
YouTuber Samperson (Sam Chiet) has showcased the humble text editor running Doom at seemingly 60fps. According to the video description, the footage has not been sped up, although there is a cut in the middle, jumping ahead “to some action”. Also claimed in the description is that Notepad itself has not been modified in any way.
Whatever program that Samperson is using to get Doom running on Notepad, he claims on Twitter that he will be releasing it in a couple of days. He also says that it still needs some work on the polish department which, from the YouTube demo, you can sort of see why. While it’s not explained, the bottom half of the screen flickers constantly.
To start off, it’s already not the most ideal way to play the the classic Doom, with the health and armour values being barely legible. And one can only imagine the headache that will ensue when dealing with a Pinky Spectre.
it'll take some work to polish NotepadDOOM into something releasable, but it'll almost certainly happen over the next couple days
— Samperson (@SamNChiet) October 9, 2022
Practicality aside, there’s no taking away the achievement of Samperson here. Getting an extremely basic text editor to run a game is as much of a miracle as getting it to run on a pregnancy test kit. If you’d like to give it a try yourself, then you should check back on his YouTube and Twitter pages every once in awhile to see if he has the working version of the Doom Notepad program released. The novelty will probably tide you over for a little while, at least until you start encountering Spectres.
(Source: Samperson [1], [2] via The Escapist)
