The classic shooter Doom, released in 1993 by developers from the American studio id Software, haunts modders. The cult game has already been launched in Paint and Notepad, and now the turn has come to the PDF file.
Image Source: DoomPDF
Enthusiastic developer Allen Ding, known as ading2210 on GitHub, has unveiled DoomPDF, a port of the original Doom that runs inside a PDF file.
The port uses a separate text field for each line and then fills them with various ASCII characters. The 6-color monochrome output achieved was sufficient to make the image legible.
Ding notes that performance using this method leaves much to be desired (see video above), but it’s playable: updating text takes about 80ms per frame.
You can play the PDF version of Doom here. The developer warns that the port only runs in Chromium-based browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera and others.
Image Source: XDA Developers
It is worth noting that recently developer Thomas Rinsma adapted the legendary puzzle Tetris for play in a PDF file. Following this, the enthusiast released a similar port of Doom, but Ding turned out to be faster.
In addition to the PDF and standard Windows applications, Doom has been run inside the Balatro roguelike poker game, on a robotic lawn mower, Nintendo’s Alarmo smart alarm clock, and many other devices.