[HN Gopher] Doom has been ported to an earbud
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Doom has been ported to an earbud
        
       Author : arin-s
       Score  : 301 points
       Date   : 2026-01-25 12:22 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (doombuds.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (doombuds.com)
        
       | arin-s wrote:
       | Hi, I ported DOOM to the Pinebuds Pro earbuds. It's accessible
       | over the internet, so you can join the queue and play DOOM on my
       | earbuds from your PC! More info as well as links to the github
       | repos can be found on the site.
        
         | RandomTeaParty wrote:
         | What compression ratio does your jpeg encoding achieve?
        
           | arin-s wrote:
           | It ranges from 5.8:1 to 4.7:1 depending on scene complexity.
           | Keep in mind I calculated these values using the 8-bit
           | pallete-based framebuffer that DOOM uses, not a 24-bit one
           | that a regular RGB buffer would use.
        
       | jurakis wrote:
       | This is awesome! the amount of devices doom has not been run on
       | shrinks by the day haha
        
       | branon wrote:
       | How are the PineBuds Pro, anyone have them? The Pine64 IRC
       | network doesn't have a channel for PineBuds discussion so I
       | haven't had an easy opportunity to ask.
        
         | arin-s wrote:
         | To be honest, I've never actually used them for their intended
         | purpose. No idea what the comfort or audio quality is like.
         | There's a Pinebuds channel on the Pine64 discord, you can ask
         | questions there :)
        
         | utopiah wrote:
         | Was using them just this morning. I've been using them since
         | they are out. Great device but battery is quite limited, ~2hrs
         | top with ANC on.
        
         | TheCraiggers wrote:
         | I'm also curious. I used to be a big supporter of Pine64 but
         | the e-ink tablet and phone debacles have kinda soured me on
         | them.
        
         | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
         | Mine have been great. Full disclosure, I deliberately don't use
         | ANC... in fact, I may have installed firmware that doesn't have
         | it. So I can't comment on that. But just as Bluetooth earbuds,
         | they do their job.
        
       | TheCraiggers wrote:
       | At first I thought you found a way to control/view the game
       | acoustically and I was very curious how that worked.
       | 
       | But, this probably makes more sense.
        
       | automatic6131 wrote:
       | Do we have Doom on a USB-C plug microcontroller yet?
        
         | KellyCriterion wrote:
         | Disposable Vape CPU!
        
       | 7777777phil wrote:
       | List of Doom ports:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doom_ports
        
         | omoikane wrote:
         | Subreddit of Doom ports: https://www.reddit.com/r/itrunsdoom/
        
       | KellyCriterion wrote:
       | Im waiting for the post "Doom ported to disposable Vape chip" :-D
        
         | DJBunnies wrote:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVsvtEj9iqE
        
           | KellyCriterion wrote:
           | Good catch! Though it misses my primary condition:
           | "disposable" - ha! :-D (this one is a refillable one, and it
           | looks like he is streaming the content from his PC?)
           | 
           | But a very cool link, thanks for sharing! :)
        
         | primitivesuave wrote:
         | The Puya PY32 series MCUs found in most vapes have 3kb of RAM
         | and 24kb of ROM, whereas Doom requires at least 4MB of RAM.
         | Assuming Moore's law also applies to the computing power inside
         | a disposable vape, we should be seeing that post in around a
         | decade :)
        
       | lombasihir wrote:
       | can we run doom on water pump?
        
       | nehalem wrote:
       | Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough
       | general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should
       | think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an
       | economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for
       | things like sending audio over a radio.
        
         | rogerrogerr wrote:
         | Or a third option - an economic success that economies of scale
         | have made massively capable hardware the cheapest option for
         | many applications, despite being overkill.
        
           | cyberrock wrote:
           | Also see: USB 3+ e-marker chips. I'm still waiting for a Doom
           | port on those.
        
           | AlecSchueler wrote:
           | Or the fourth option, an environmental disaster all around
        
             | dubbie99 wrote:
             | The materials that go into a chip are nothing. The process
             | of making the chip is roughly the same no matter the power
             | of it. So having one chip that can satisfy a large range of
             | customers needs is so much better than wasting development
             | time making a custom just good enough chip for each.
        
               | AlecSchueler wrote:
               | > The materials that go into a chip are nothing.
               | 
               | They really aren't. Every material that goes into every
               | chip needs to be sourced from various mines around the
               | world, shipped to factories to be assembled, then the end
               | goods need to be shipped again around the world to be
               | sold or directly dumped.
               | 
               | High power, low power, it all has negative environmental
               | impact.
        
               | direwolf20 wrote:
               | Which materials are they and how would you suggest doing
               | it with fewer materials?
        
               | stackghost wrote:
               | In theory, graphene based semiconductors would eliminate
               | a lot of need for shipping and mining.
        
               | serf wrote:
               | ultra pure water production itself is responsible for
               | untold amounts of hydroflouric acid and ammonia , and
               | most etching processes have an F-Gas involved, and most
               | plants that do this work have tremendously high energy
               | (power) costs due to stability needs/hvac.
               | 
               | it's not 'just sand'.
        
               | direwolf20 wrote:
               | How would you suggest doing it with fewer materials?
        
               | cortesoft wrote:
               | That doesn't contradict the point, though. The negative
               | impact on the environment is not reduced by making a less
               | powered chip.
        
             | Aurornis wrote:
             | It's the opposite. Using an off the shelf MCU is much more
             | efficient than trying to spin your own ASIC.
             | 
             | Doing the work in software allows for updates and bug
             | fixes, which are more likely to prevent piles of hardware
             | from going into the landfill (in some cases before they
             | even reach customers' hands).
        
             | compiler-devel wrote:
             | Nobody cares, unless they're commenting for an easy win on
             | internet message boards.
        
         | danielbln wrote:
         | It's already very cheap to build though. We are able to pack a
         | ton of processing into a tiny form factor for little money
         | (comparatively, ignoring end-consumer margins etc.).
         | 
         | An earbud that does ANC, supports multiple different audio
         | standard including low battery standby, is somewhat resistant
         | to interference, can send and receive over many meters. That's
         | awesome for the the price. That it has enough processing to run
         | a 33 year old game.. well, that's just technological
         | progression.
         | 
         | A single modern smartphone has more compute than all global
         | conpute of 1980 combined.
        
           | ck2 wrote:
           | I need that in lunar-lander exponents
           | 
           | (imagine the lunar lander computer being an earbud ha)
        
             | danielbln wrote:
             | Well, current smartphone would be about 10^8 times
             | faster/more than the lunar lander.
             | 
             | A single Airpod would be about 10^4 times as powerful as
             | the entire lunar lander guidance system.
             | 
             | Or to put another way: a single Airpod would outcompute the
             | entire Soviet Union's space program.
        
         | varjag wrote:
         | Earbuds often have features like mic beam forming and noise
         | cancellation which require a substantial degree of processing
         | power. It's hardly unjustified compared to your Teams instance
         | making fans spin or Home Assistant bringing down an RPi to its
         | knees.
        
           | nehalem wrote:
           | No doubt, maybe should I have emphasised the "general" part
           | of "general purpose" more. Not a hardware person myself, I
           | wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that
           | could do the same more cheaply - think F(P)GA.
        
             | Aurornis wrote:
             | > I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware
             | that could do the same more cheaply - think F(P)GA.
             | 
             | FPGAs are not cost efficient at all for something like
             | this.
             | 
             | MCUs are so cheap that you'd never get to a cheaper
             | solution by building out a team to iterate on custom
             | hardware until it was bug free and ready to scale. You'd
             | basically be reinventing the MCU that can be bought for
             | $0.10, but with tens of millions of dollars of engineering
             | and without economies of scale that the MCU companies have.
        
             | nicoburns wrote:
             | > I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware
             | that could do the same more cheaply
             | 
             | Where are you imagining costy savings coming from? Custom
             | anything is almost always vastly more expensive than using
             | a standardised product.
        
         | TrainedMonkey wrote:
         | > CPU: Dual-core 300MHz ARM Cortex-M4F
         | 
         | It's absolute bonkers amount of hardware scaling that happened
         | since Doom was released. Yes, this is a tremendous overkill
         | here, but the crazy part here is that this fits into an
         | earpiece.
        
           | Telemakhos wrote:
           | I remember playing Doom on a single-core 25MHz 486 laptop. It
           | was, at the time, an amazing machine, hundreds of times more
           | powerful than the flight computer that ran the Apollo space
           | capsule, and now it is outclassed by an earbud.
        
             | iberator wrote:
             | Can we finally end this Apollo computer comparison forever?
             | It was a real time computer NOT designed for speed but real
             | time operations.1
             | 
             | Why don't you compare it to let's say pdp11, vax780/11 or
             | Cray 1 supercomputer?
             | 
             | NASA used a lot of supercomputers here on earth pior to
             | mission start.
        
               | mlyle wrote:
               | > It was a real time computer NOT designed for speed but
               | real time operations.
               | 
               | More than anything, it was designed to be small and use
               | little power.
               | 
               | But these little ARM Cortex M4F that we're comparing to
               | are also designed for embedded, possibly hard-real-time
               | operations. And dominant factors in experience on
               | playback through earbuds are response time and jitter.
               | 
               | If the AGC could get a capsule to the moon doing hard
               | real-time tasks (and spilling low priority tasks as
               | necessary), a single STM32F405 with a Cortex M4F could do
               | it better.
               | 
               | Actually, my team is going to fly a STM32F030 for minimal
               | power management tasks-- but still hard real-time-- on a
               | small satellite. Cortex-M0. It fits in 25 milliwatts vs
               | 55W. We're clocked slow, but still exceed the throughput
               | of the AGC by ~200-300x. Funnily enough, the amount of
               | RAM is about the same as the AGC :D It's 70 cents in
               | quantity, but we have to pay three whole dollars at
               | quantity 1.
               | 
               | > NASA used a lot of supercomputers here on earth pior to
               | mission start.
               | 
               | Fine, let's compare to the CDC 6600, the fastest computer
               | of the late 60's. M4F @ 300MHz is a couple hundred single
               | precision megaflops; CDC6600 was like 3 not-quite-double-
               | precision megaflops. The hacky "double single precision"
               | techniques have comparable precision-- figure that is
               | probably about 10x slower on average, so each M4F could
               | do about 20 CDC-6600 equivalent megaflops or is roughly
               | 5-10x faster. The amount of RAM is about the same on this
               | earbud.
               | 
               | His 486-25 -- if a DX model with the FPU -- was probably
               | roughly twice as fast as the 6600 and probably had 4x the
               | RAM, and used 2 orders of magnitude less power and massed
               | 3 orders of magnitude less.
               | 
               | Control flow, integer math, etc, being much faster than
               | that.
               | 
               | Just a few more pennies gets you a microcontroller with a
               | double precision FPU, like a Cortex-M7F with the
               | FPv4-SP-D16, which at 300MHz is good for maybe 60 double
               | precision megaflops-- compared to the 6600, 20x faster
               | and more precision.
        
               | mlyle wrote:
               | I have thought about this a little more, and looked into
               | things. Since NASA used the 360/91, and had a _lot_ of
               | 360 's and 7900's... all of NASA's 60's computing
               | couldn't quite fit into a single 486DX-25. You'd be more
               | like 486DX2-100 era to replace _everything_ comfortably,
               | and you 'd want a lot of RAM-- like 16MB.
               | 
               | It looks like NASA had 5 360/75's plus a 360/91 by the
               | end, plus a few other computers.
               | 
               | The biggest 360/75's (I don't know that NASA had the
               | highest spec model for all 5) were probably roughly
               | 1/10th of a 486-100 plus 1 megabyte of RAM. The 360/91
               | that they had at the end was maybe 1/3rd of a 486-100
               | plus up to 6 megabytes of RAM.
               | 
               | Those computers alone would be about 85% of a 486-100.
               | Everything else was comparatively small. And, of course,
               | you need to include the benefits from getting results on
               | individual jobs much faster, even if sustained max
               | throughput is about the same. So all of NASA, by the late
               | 60's, probably fits into one relatively large 486DX4-100.
               | 
               | Incidentally, one random bit of my family lore; my dad
               | was an IBM man and knew a lot about 360's and OS/360. He
               | received a call one evening from NASA during Apollo 13
               | asking for advice about how they could get a little bit
               | more out of their machines. My mom was miffed about
               | dinner being interrupted until she understood why :D
        
             | tadfisher wrote:
             | And perhaps more fittingly, that PC couldn't decode and
             | play an MP3 in real time.
        
           | mlyle wrote:
           | This is the "little part" of what fits into an earpiece. Each
           | of those cores is maybe 0.04 square millimeters of die on
           | e.g. 28nm process. RAM takes some area, but that's dwarfed by
           | the analog and power components and packaging. The marginal
           | cost of the gates making up the processors is effectively
           | zero.
        
             | trhway wrote:
             | so 1mm2 peppered by those cores at 300MHz will give you 4
             | Tflops. And whole 200mm wafer - 100 Petaflops, like 10
             | B200s, and just at less than $3K/wafer. Giving half area to
             | memory we'll get 50 PFlops with 300Gb RAM. Power draw is
             | like 10-20KW. So, giving these numbers i'd guess Cerebras
             | has tremendous margin and is just printing money :)
        
               | mlyle wrote:
               | Yes, assuming you don't need to connect anything together
               | and that RAM is tinier than it really is, sure. At 28nm,
               | 3megabits/square millimeter is what you get of SRAM, so
               | an entire wafer only gets you ~12 gigabytes of memory.
               | 
               | And, of course, most of Cerebras' costs are NRE and the
               | stuff like getting heat out of that wafer and power in.
        
           | wolvoleo wrote:
           | Yes but also Doom is very very old.
           | 
           | I bought a kodak camera in 2000 (640x480 resolution) and even
           | that could run Doom on it. Way back when. Actually playable
           | with sounds and everything.
           | 
           | Here's an even older one running it:
           | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k-AnvqiKzjY
        
         | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
         | If it can run Doom it can run malware.
        
         | tt24 wrote:
         | Incredible to see people try to spin the wild successes of
         | market based economies as an economic failure.
         | 
         | Hardware is cheap and small enough that we can run doom on an
         | earbud, and I'm supposed to think this is a bad thing?
        
           | hashmap wrote:
           | I can sort of see one angle for it, and the parent story kind
           | of supports it. Bad software is a forcing function for good
           | hardware - the worse that software has gotten in the past few
           | decades the better hardware has had to get to support it.
           | Such that if you actually tried like OP did, you can do some
           | pretty crazy things on tiny hardware these days. Imagine what
           | we could do on computers if they weren't so bottlenecked
           | doing things they don't need to do.
        
             | tt24 wrote:
             | That wasn't the GP's claim. Their implication was that it's
             | an economic failure that we don't produce less powerful
             | hardware.
        
         | gpm wrote:
         | Neither - it's a triumph of our ability to do increasing
         | complex things in both software and hardware. An earbud should
         | be able to make good use of the extra computing capacity,
         | whether it is to run more sophisticated compression saving
         | bandwidth, or for features like more sophisticated noise
         | cancelling/microphone isolation algorithms. There are really
         | very few devices that shouldn't be able to be better given more
         | (free) compute.
         | 
         | It's also a triumph of the previous generation of programmers
         | to be able to make interesting games that took so little
         | compute.
        
           | echelon wrote:
           | There are enough atoms in that earbud to replace all of the
           | world's computers.
           | 
           | We've got a long way to go.
        
           | buildbot wrote:
           | Plus there's actually less waste, I would imagine, by using a
           | generic, very efficiently mass produced, but way overkill
           | part. vs. a one off or very specific, rare but perfectly
           | matched part.
        
         | mlyle wrote:
         | Marginal cost of a small microprocessor in an ASIC is
         | _nothing_.
         | 
         | The RAM costs a little bit, but if you want to firmware update
         | in a friendly way, etc, you need some RAM to stage the updates.
        
         | notarobot123 wrote:
         | It's intuitive to think of wasted compute capacity as
         | correlating with a waste of material resources. Is this really
         | the case though?
        
           | mathgeek wrote:
           | Waste is subjective or, at best, hard to define. It's the
           | classic "get rid of all the humans and nothing would be
           | wasted" aphorism.
        
         | daft_pink wrote:
         | If you look at the bottom of the page, it's an advertisement
         | for someone looking for a job to show off his technical skill.
        
           | ornornor wrote:
           | Okay? Is that good or bad or what?
        
         | Waterluvian wrote:
         | I imagine it's far more economical to have one foundry that can
         | make a general purpose chip that's overpowered for 95% of uses
         | than to try to make a ton of different chips. It speaks to how
         | a lot of the actual cost is the manufacturing and R&D.
        
           | sdenton4 wrote:
           | The only real problem I could see is if the general purpose
           | microcontroller is significantly more power-hungry than a
           | specialized chip, impacting the battery life of the earbuds.
           | 
           | On every other axis, though, it's likely a very clear win:
           | reusable chips means cheaper units, which often translates
           | into real resource savings (in the extreme case, it may save
           | an entire additional factory for the custom chips, saving
           | untold energy and effort.)
        
         | tobinc wrote:
         | I think it's just indicative of the fact that general purpose
         | hardware has more applications, and can thus be mass produced
         | for cheaper at a greater scale and used for more applications.
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | > Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including
         | enough general purpose hardware
         | 
         | The PineBuds are designed and sold as an open firmware platform
         | to allow software experimentation, so there's nothing bad nor
         | any economic failures going on here. Having a powerful general
         | purpose microcontroller to experiment with is a design goal of
         | the product.
         | 
         | That said, ANC Bluetooth earbuds are not menial products. Doing
         | ANC properly is very complicated. It's much harder than taking
         | the input from a microphone, inverting the signal, and feeding
         | it into the output. There's a lot of computation that needs to
         | be done continuously.
         | 
         | Using a powerful microcontroller isn't a failure, it's a
         | benefit of having advanced semiconductor processes. Basically
         | anything small and power efficient on a modern process will
         | have no problem running at tens of MHz speeds. You want modern
         | processes for the battery efficiency and you get speed as a
         | bonus.
         | 
         | The speed isn't wasted, either. Higher clock speeds means lower
         | latency. In a battery powered device having an MCU running at
         | 48MHz may seem excessive until you realize that the faster it
         | finishes every unit of work the sooner it can go to sleep. It's
         | not always about raw power.
         | 
         | Modern earbuds are complicated. Having a general purpose MCU to
         | allow software updates is much better than trying to get the
         | entire wireless stack, noise cancellation, and everything else
         | completely perfect before spinning out a custom ASIC.
         | 
         | We're very fortunate to have all of this at our disposal. The
         | groveling about putting powerful microcontrollers into small
         | things ignores the reality of how hard it is to make a bug-free
         | custom ASIC and break even on it relative to spending $0.10 per
         | unit on a proven microcontroller manufacturer at scale.
        
           | ashtakeaway wrote:
           | Thanks ChatGPT
        
             | awesome_dude wrote:
             | These accusations of someone using ChatGPT are cheap
             | mindless attacks based on nothing more than the fact that
             | someone has put together a good argument and used good
             | formatting.
             | 
             | If that's all your evidence is, don't you dare go near any
             | scientific papers.
        
         | the_fall wrote:
         | > economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for
         | things like sending audio over a radio.
         | 
         | You're literally just wasting sand. We've perfected the process
         | to the point where it's inexpensive to produce tiny and cheap
         | chips that pack more power than a 386 computer. It makes little
         | difference if it's 1,000 transistors or 1,000,000. It gets more
         | complicated on the cutting edge, but this ain't it. These chips
         | are probably 90 nm or 40 nm, a technology that's two decades
         | old, and it's basically the off-ramp for older-generation chip
         | fabs that can no longer crank out cutting-edge CPUs or GPUs.
         | 
         | Building specialized hardware for stuff like that costs a lot
         | more than writing software that uses just the portions you
         | need. It requires deeper expertise, testing is more expensive
         | and slower, etc.
        
         | pibaker wrote:
         | You should see it as the triumph of chip manufacturing --
         | advanced, powerful MCUs have became so cheap thanks to
         | manufacturing capabilities and economies of scale means it is
         | now cheaper to use a mass manufactured general purpose device
         | that may take more material to manufacture than a simpler
         | bespoke device that will be produced at low volumes.
         | 
         | You might be wondering "how on earth a more advanced chip can
         | end up being cheaper." Well, it may surprise you but not all
         | cost in manufacturing is material cost. If you have to design a
         | bespoke chip for your earbuds, you need to now hire chip
         | designers, you need to go through the whole design and testing
         | process, you need to get someone to make your bespoke chip in
         | smaller quantities which may easily end up more expensive than
         | the more powerful mass manufactured chips, you will need to
         | teach your programmers how to program on your new chip, and so
         | on. The material savings (which are questionable -- are you
         | sure you can make your bespoke chip more efficiently than the
         | mass manufactured ones?) are easily outweighed by business
         | costs in other parts of the manufacturing process.
        
         | gjsman-1000 wrote:
         | I will never understand people who treat MHz like a rationed
         | resource.
        
       | arin-s wrote:
       | The standalone viewer (connected directly to the earbuds) also
       | works on mobile: https://files.catbox.moe/pdvphj.mp4
       | 
       | No touch controls though, it just plays the intro loop
        
       | npsomaratna wrote:
       | On a tangent: I remember reading John Carmak saying that as game
       | engines became more complex, he had to relinquish the idea of
       | writing all the (engine) code himself, and start to rely on other
       | folks contributions as well (this was in an interview after the
       | release of Doom 3).
       | 
       | I wonder what his feelings are in this age of AI.
        
         | Insanity wrote:
         | John is now on a mission to make AGI a reality. I'd say given
         | his own investment there, he's probably positive about it.
         | 
         | Just speculation on my part of course.
         | 
         | Also, "masters of doom" is such a good book. Recommend it for
         | anyone who wants to peek behind the scenes of how Carmack,
         | Romero, and iD software built Doom (and Wolf3D etc).
        
           | lgvld wrote:
           | Yes such a fantastic book. I thought about it recently while
           | reading this article about the three teenagers who created
           | the Mirai botnet, same vibes, you would probably like it:
           | https://www.wired.com/story/mirai-untold-story-three-
           | young-h...
        
         | nortlov wrote:
         | Carmak made extensive use of AI during Doom development:
         | Approximate Interpolation.
        
       | optimalsolver wrote:
       | Relevant SMBC, "Computer scientist vs computer engineer":
       | https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-17
        
       | shevy-java wrote:
       | I am a bit said that it is always Doom.
       | 
       | Now ... I played the game when I was young. It was addictive. I
       | don't think it was a good game but it was addictive. And somewhat
       | simple.
       | 
       | So what is the problem then? Well ... games have gotten a lot
       | bigger, often more complicated. Trying to port that to small
       | platforms is close to impossible. This makes me sad. I think the
       | industry, excluding indie tech/startups, totally lost the focus
       | here. The games that are now en vogue, do not interest me at all.
       | Sometimes they have interesting ideas - I liked little nightmares
       | here - but they are huge and very different from the older games.
       | And often much more boring too.
       | 
       | One of my favourite DOS games was master of orion 1 for instance.
       | I could, despite its numerous flaws, play that again and again
       | and again. Master of Orion 2 was not bad either, but it was
       | nowhere near as addictive and the gameplay was also more
       | convoluted and slower.
       | 
       | (Sometimes semi-new games are also ok such as Warcraft 3. I am
       | not saying ALL new games are bad, but it seems as if games were
       | kind of dumbed down to be more like a video to watch, with semi-
       | few interactive elements as you watch it. That's IMO not really a
       | game. And just XP grinding for the big bad wolf to scale to the
       | next level, deal out more damage, as your HP grows ... that's not
       | really playing either. That's just wasting your time.)
        
         | dclowd9901 wrote:
         | Im with you. I want to play Freespace 2 on earbuds.
        
         | RadiozRadioz wrote:
         | It's Doom in part because it's a significantly popular game,
         | that was open sourced, with low resource requirements (but not
         | too low to be trivial), with an innovative custom engine that
         | people find interesting, originally created by a person who
         | many respect or admired growing up, and the game itself is
         | cool. And now there is enough inertia to keep choosing it.
        
           | m-p-3 wrote:
           | I wish there were more ports of Duke Nukem 3D :(
        
         | Guvante wrote:
         | Most people don't realize that games were small back then
         | because they had to be.
         | 
         | The value of being small for most users almost doesn't exist.
         | If you have bandwidth limits then yeah download size is
         | important but most don't.
         | 
         | So the only meaningful change optimizations make is "will it
         | run well enough" and "does it fit on my disk".
         | 
         | Put more plainly "if it works at all it doesn't matter" is how
         | most consumers (probably correctly) treat performance
         | optimizations/installation size.
         | 
         | The sacrifices you talk about were made at explicit request of
         | consumers. Games have to be "long enough" and the difference
         | between enough game loop and grinding is a taste thing. Games
         | have to be "pretty" and for better or worse stylized takes
         | effort and is a taste thing (see Wind Waker) while fancy high
         | res lighting engines are generally recognized as good.
         | 
         | I will say though while being made by indies means they are
         | optimized terribly the number of stylized short games is
         | phenomenally high it can just be hard to find them.
         | 
         | Especially since it is difficult for an hour or two game to be
         | as impactful as a similar length movie so they tend to not be
         | brought up as frequently.
        
           | bitmasher9 wrote:
           | Storage space is at a premium. The PS5 has about 650gb of
           | usable space. At ~100gb/game which is not uncommon you can
           | store 6 games on the console without needing to free up hard
           | drive space.
           | 
           | Filesize matters, especially to people with limited bandwidth
           | and data caps. The increasing cost of SSDs only makes this
           | situation more hardware constrained.
        
       | neurostimulant wrote:
       | > Earbuds don't have displays, so the only way to transfer data
       | to/from them is either via bluetooth, or the UART contact pads.
       | Bluetooth is pretty slow, you'd be lucky to get a consistent
       | 1mbps connection, UART is easily the better option.
       | 
       | Does this means you can run a doom instance on each bud? Is it
       | viable to make a distributed app to use the computing power of
       | both buds at once?
        
         | arin-s wrote:
         | This was a stretch goal, multiplayer. One earbuds versus the
         | other. It's not that hard to implement but I've got a few other
         | things to clear away first.
         | 
         | Using them for distributed computation though? interesting use
         | of free will xD
        
           | RandomTeaParty wrote:
           | Compute one half of the screen on each
           | 
           | Left ear for the right eye and vice versa
        
           | jentulman wrote:
           | Single player, but stereoscopic? One display from each bud.
           | 
           | "VR Doom has been ported to an earbud(s)" ;)
        
       | moktonar wrote:
       | We should definitely send a playable copy of doom to aliens on a
       | golden record on the next Voyager mission
        
         | listeria wrote:
         | and risk having them interpret it as a declaration of war?
        
       | epenn wrote:
       | In light of this I propose "Doom's Law" as the ultimate
       | expression of late stage capitalism:
       | 
       | - Society continues to produce more and more powerful devices.
       | 
       | - More and more of these devices begin running Doom.
       | 
       | - When this reaches the saturation point, society _becomes_ Doom.
        
       | WXLCKNO wrote:
       | A few more years and some more ram on these earbuds and we'll be
       | able to run some nice local earbud kubernetes clusters
        
       | anthk wrote:
       | It's possible to run Zork I-III Frotz under a pen, some FPGA and
       | even interpreting a PostScript file. Even the Game Boy, the C64,
       | MSX... So, Doom is not the most ported game ever.
        
       | catlifeonmars wrote:
       | As an aside, I really like the style of the page. I wish it was
       | available as a classless css dropin stylesheet.
        
       | j1elo wrote:
       | Next up idea: ThunderDoom
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750419
        
         | mikeayles wrote:
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1ihufa0/doom_running...
        
       | frizlab wrote:
       | > wow this front end code is atrocious, state management is
       | everywhe-
       | 
       | > shhhh don't look don't look it's ok just join the queue
       | 
       | love it
        
       | wolvoleo wrote:
       | But can it run crysis?
        
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