Doom, the iconic first-person shooter, has been adapted to run on everything from toasters to fridges, pushing the boundaries of what devices can handle this classic game. However, the frontier for truly remarkable platforms to run Doom is becoming increasingly challenging to expand. Enter a high school student who has ingeniously ported Doom into a PDF file that you can run directly in your browser.
Sure, this version of Doom lacks minor elements like text and sound, but who really needs those when you can play the iconic E1M1 level while procrastinating on those taxes you've been putting off?
Github user and high school student ading2210 drew inspiration from a recent port of Tetris, named TetrisPDF, to the humble PDF format. Determined to push the envelope further, ading2210 made one of the world's most celebrated shooters playable in a Chromium-based browser near you.
ading2210 leveraged the way Javascript is used inside a browser's PDF reader to port Doom to a .PDF file. While the official specifications for a PDF allow for more sophisticated scripting, security concerns in browsers limit these capabilities. Nonetheless, it was sufficient to port Doom to this format.
The Javascript capabilities within the PDF specifications enabled ading2210 to "do whatever computation we want," resulting in a glorious outcome. Using a six-color ASCII grid to represent sprites and graphics, the high school student managed to deliver a legible port of Doom, albeit with a lengthy response time of 80ms per frame drawn on screen.
While you might not want to trade in your PS5 just yet, witnessing Doom running inside a .PDF file is undeniably impressive, especially given the overall legibility of the result.
Thomas Rinsma, the creator of TetrisPDF, posted on Hacker News that he had also developed his own version of PDF Doom, but acknowledged that ading2210's version was "neater in many ways."
Although this version of Doom might not be the ideal way to experience the game for the first time, the novelty of seeing Doom run on an array of absurd devices, files, or even living gut bacteria, continues to captivate and entertain.
