If you thought running the classic 1993 shooter Doom on a medical ultrasound scanner was ridiculous, this next one will have you in orbit.
According to ZDnet, an Icelandic software developer named Ólafur Waage has successfully ported Doom to run on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) OPS-SAT satellite. Specifically, Waage hacked the OPS-SAT’s flight computer, which is “10 times more powerful than any current ESA spacecraft,” as The Register puts it.
While Doom enthusiasts have for years hacked the Id Software classic to run on a staggering array of earth-bound objects, from a nicotine vape to the MacBook Pro Touch Bar to a Samsung washing machine to human gut bacteria, the game — famously set on Mars — had yet to leave the troposphere.
Before we blast off, an important caveat: a lot of headline grabbing Doom ports aren’t technically “running” the game at all. Some of them, like the infamous pregnancy test experiment, simply use an exotic device’s screen as an output, while an external computer processes the game’s code.
This one is different — and likely one of the most expensive Doom ports to date. As ZDNet tells it, Waage had a little help from some high-powered friends, like ESA engineer Georges Labrèche.
“It was as much a work of his as it was mine and the whole ESA team,” Waage said of the achievement at the latest Ubuntu Summit.
In a video summarizing the whole experiment, Waage explains that the satellite technically has no screen, and that “even if it did, it would take a pretty good telescope to see what was going on.”
Initially, the team wrote a script for the satellite’s computer to update mission control with the current stats of the Doom demo, where the game simulates a player running through a pre-set number of actions, like slaying enemies, picking up items, and discovering secret locations.
“A text output saying you ran Doom is nice, but it’s not nice enough,” the programmer said. “What we wanted was a screenshot of the satellite playing Doom.”
The only wrinkle was that OPS-SAT has no graphics card, meaning it wasn’t capable of generating any footage the way computers do on Earth. However, the satellite does have an on-board camera facing the ground — and that gave the programmers some ideas.
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