Perfectly useless and, in so doing, impossible to ignore, some gentle madman has once again taken up the challenge of making DOOM run on "anything".
There's no doubt about it, DOOM is what you might call a monument, not just to the world of video games, but to the world of culture as a whole. A monument born in 1993 from the fertile imagination of the developers at id Software. Its main progenitors - John Carmack and John Romero - have since adapted the formula in several installments, but the original remains THE benchmark for first-person shooters. Since the release of the first opus, adapting it to machines for which it was clearly not intended has even become a kind of hobby, a tinkerer's test. A case in point is this oddball who proposed a version capable of running on a pregnancy test! Less original, but so much more logical, a hobbyist hacked Nintendo's latest-generation Game & Watch to port the illustrious DOOM. See the video below.
But today, we're in for something different again, as Aaron Christophel has set himself the task of running DOOM on his Anker Prime Charger, a device designed to do away with all the adapters of our daily lives and recharge our devices with a single machine. Aaron Christophel began by noting his product's remarkable datasheet: based on a rather muscular SoC (the Synwit SWM34), it features a Cortex M-33 core with 8 MB of SDRAM and 16 MB of storage space. We're talking about a maximum core frequency of 150 MHz. More importantly, the Anker Prime Charger features a small, full-color screen to manage its various options, with a 480 x 220 pixel definition that Aaron Christophel has not used in its entirety to make the port run more smoothly. Logically named Anker DOOM, this port is visibly functional, as you can see in the video above. It even runs "better than expected", to quote Aaron Christophel.
To "play", of course, you don't need to plug in a keyboard or mouse, let alone a gamepad, even though the Anker Prime Charger has six USB ports. No, the only way to enter commands is to use the little wheel on the right-hand side of the device. With it, Aaron Christophel is able to move forward, turn and even shoot, but we can't say the experience is particularly exhilarating. What's more, Anker DOOM has one notable flaw directly linked to the technical limitations of the Anker Primer Charger: there's no sound whatsoever. Having said that, the important thing was not to rediscover the sensations of yesteryear, but simply to take up a challenge, and from that point of view, it's perfectly successful!
