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How a programmer got Doom to run on a space satellite and what happened next

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A hacker with some help from the ESA got Doom to run on a satellite.

This was built on years of open-source Doom being ported to every computing device you can conceive of.

The experiment showed off open-source software's adaptability

LONDON: Say it with me, say it loud. "Doom in Space!" You can almost hear the reverb, can't you? Doom, the 1993 game that was once installed on more computers than Windows, is famous for several reasons, including jump-starting the first-person shooter genre and running on pretty much every computing platform you can imagine. This includes everything from lawnmowers to iPods to supercomputers. There are even efforts afoot to get Doom to run on quantum computers.

Recently, Doom moved to space, the final frontier.

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Ólafur Waage, a senior software developer from Iceland who now works in Norway, explained at Ubuntu Summit 25.10 how he, a self-described "professional keyboard typist" and maker of funny videos, ended up making what is perhaps the game's most outlandish port yet: Doom running on a real satellite in orbit, the European Space Agency (ESA) OPS-SAT satellite.

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