It Runs DOOM #5

“But can it run DOOM?” is the techie’s go-to joke for just about any piece of hardware with a screen – and for good reason.

*The original DOOM’s software was so ubiquitous at height of its popularity during the shareware era that fans took it upon themselves to get it running on as many devices as possible – no matter how ridiculous. *

As a result, the game has been ported, emulated or imitated on countless devices thanks to skilled programmers with a little know-how and some elbow grease. They may not all be the most optimized rigs for playing shooters, but these fun feats in engineering deserve a shout-out because, well, they run DOOM.

At the ATM

What better way to pass the time waiting for your cash to dispense from the ATM than a rousing game of DOOM? When Australian hackers came into possession of an actual ATM, specifically an NCR Personas, what was one of the first challenges they tasked themselves with? If you’ve been following along, the answer should be obvious: install DOOM on it.

Now, putting aside how exactly these fellows got hold of a cash machine, it isn’t all that farfetched a scheme. Many modern ATMs use a version of Microsoft Windows as their operating system, so the challenge is not so much getting DOOM running but more about getting access to the guts of the machine and the operating system itself. Still, that’s a pretty impressive feat when accomplished.

The outcome speaks for itself: in fact, DOOM runs so smoothly on the thing that they actually ended up rigging the whole machine as an arcade cabinet, repurposing the keypad as a controller and the side buttons for weapon selection. There’s even talk of getting the receipt printer to print out high scores.

Talk about taking your DOOM skills to the bank!