Over the years, we’ve seen the internet’s favourite past time of porting Doom over to unconventional and sometimes, inappropriate platforms. Continuing that tradition is Github user ading2210, who successfully managed to port the classic shooter into a PDF File.
ading2210 describes themself as a high school student with an interest in programming, web programming, and cybersecurity. They say that the project, aptly named DoomPDF, was possible mainly because it supports Javascript. Additionally, it appears that Adobe Acrobat actually has the capacity to support some “ridiculous” things, such as 3D Rendering.
There are some drawbacks though, if you’re planning on running ading2210’s DoomPDF. Firstly, you’ll need to be running a Chromium Browser. As per their explanation:
Previous interactive PDF projects I’ve seen use individual text fields that are toggled on/off to make individual pixels. However, Doom’s resolution is 320×200 which would mean thousands of text fields would have to be toggled every frame, which is infeasible. Instead, this port uses a separate text field for each row in the screen, then it sets their contents to various ASCII characters. I managed to get a 6 color monochrome output this way, which is enough for things to be legible in-game.
As mentioned, we’ve seen Doom get ported into less than conventional platforms. To date, the game has been ported onto Notepad, an electronic pregnancy test kit, a Windows 95 OS running within Minecraft, a robotic lawnmower, and more recently, the Nintendo Alarmo clock. And the list goes on.
