I'm starting to fall victim to a kind of paranoia. Is there anything Doom can't do right now? Is there anything that isn't working right now? I start to notice the E1M1 music at the edge of my hearing as I go about my work and catch a glimpse of Cacodemons out of the corner of my eye. Am I Run Doom? Are you?
Your toothbrush is. Or, well, it could be, because the latest unlikely device to house the granddaddy of every FPS on Earth is a Planck mini toothbrush. Rinse and floss, slayer until done.
Discovered by 404 mediaToothbrush Doom comes from a wizard named Aaron Christophel, who hacked the WiFi-enabled toothbrush customized firmware before loading a special, custom version of Doom onto the thing. Normally, the Planck Mini's Wi-Fi functions are only used to monitor dental hygiene: so you can collect reports and information about your children's brushing habits even when you are not at home. Sounds borderline unhinged to me, but I am not a Colgate parent or agent To ensure.
Anyway, after the Planck was fully jailbroken, Christophel used a few GitHub projects to get Doom running on his small screen. The first was a project by developer Jeroen Domburg that got Doom walks on a Christmas tree ball a while ago, and the second one was by Simon Howard Miniwad, a teeny-tiny version of Doom that did much of the work of shrinking the game down enough to fit on the Brush's 4MB of flash memory. Still, Christophel had to scale down this version to get the thing to work.
The toothbrush hacks were done, now all that was left was to play Doom on the thing. It runs…actually very smoothly and can be controlled with a regular computer mouse, although the lack of a built-in speaker means you won't be able to hear the mint rendition of a shotgun blast you've ever heard in your life.
Frankly, it's great, and if we're doomed (heh), to advance inexorably down this road to a cyberpunk future where everything returns our personal data to a shadowy empire of San Francisco tech bros and you can murder people , by refreshing their brains, then at least we get these absurd little projects to entertain us along the way. After all, you have to remain optimistic even in hell on earth.
