Saturday, July 11, 2026

Doom runs natively on the driver chip of an Ikea LED lamp

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It is clear to everyone that there has been enormous progress in processor technology, but with the little computing power that users experienced milestones a few decades ago, it surprises in practice time and time again.

Developer Nicola Wrachien demonstrated this with a crafting project. To do this, he extracted the chip from an Ikea LED lamp, in which today it is good enough to control the functions of the simple product. But with this he could at least make the 3D shooter. condemn which, when released in late 1993, set the standard for real-time graphics and motion in a 3D world.

However, Wrachien, who hails from Hungary, ran a somewhat stripped down version of the game on the lamp controller, which notably lowered the RAM requirement. In the end, the computing power of the chip was enough to run the shooter at 35 frames per second on a small 160 x 128 pixel screen. which reports that PC Magazine.

Doom in the IKEA lampLamp disassembled…
Doom in the IKEA lamp…Doom console assembled

According to her own statements, she came up with the idea based on a report that Doom was also made to work with an electronic pregnancy test. However, as it turned out, the device was equipped with an additional OLED panel and played only one stream, while the actual calculations were carried out on a PC.

Because of this, the developer published in advance the conditions by which his work should be measured; among other things, only Ikea’s lamp chip should be used, which can be purchased for $14.95. The SoC consists of an ARM Cortex M33 with 96 + 12 kilobytes of RAM. However, as additional hardware, it approved components that were absolutely necessary but could not be found on the lamp itself: a separate circuit board, 8 megabytes of flash memory to accommodate the game and an operating system, a power connection, and connections. for the keyboard. and audio output.

See also:


Processor, CPU, Chip, SoC, Hardware, GPU, Processors, Chips, Motherboard, Nanometer, System On Chip, Motherboard, Circuit Board, Printed Circuit Board
Processor, CPU, Chip, SoC, Hardware, GPU, Processors, Chips, Motherboard, Nanometer, System On Chip, Motherboard, Circuit Board, Printed Circuit Board

Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was a celebrated American author whose novels earned worldwide recognition for their depth, artistry, and cultural significance. Her influential works continue to inspire readers and writers across generations.

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