Earlier this week, a Twitter user known as GaryOderNichts pulled off an intriguing feat by hacking Nintendo’s Alarmo alarm clock to play the shareware version of Doom. He shared a video of this impressive hack on a Twitter thread, sparking interest and curiosity among gaming enthusiasts.
In the thread, Gary lays out some technical details. He mentions that, at this stage, there’s no audio support, and that you need to compress the Doom shareware .wad file, then decompress it upon boot-up to get around USB loader memory constraints. Interestingly, you don’t need to tweak your Alarmo unnecessarily. Gary has made the necessary project files available on GitHub for anyone curious to try it out.
Now, you might wonder how such a hack is even possible. Gary elaborated in a comprehensive blog post that he began his project by dissecting the Alarmo to get a good look at its internal hardware. At the heart of Nintendo Alarmo is an STM32H730ZBI6 Arm Cortex-M7 processor, which is thankfully well-documented. This enabled Gary to successfully hack the device and tether it to his Raspberry Pi.
In a tweet following his previous update, he amusingly noted: “After my last post, it was pretty clear what everyone wanted to see on the Alarmo. So, here it is – Doom running on the Nintendo Alarmo!”
Gary’s endeavor involved some soldering and modifications to make the exploit function. However, the final setup, which is available on GitHub, doesn’t require users to modify their Alarmo to play Doom from a USB.
The controls for Doom on the Alarmo are ingeniously adapted. They rely on the buttons and touch dial on top of the device. For instance, swiping is used for aiming left and right, while shooting is done via the notification button on the bottom-right corner. Other controls, if there are any, remain undocumented, as observed in the video where Gary showcases one of the initial levels of Doom.
Though the idea of a $99 alarm clock from Nintendo running Doom might seem quirky, it’s not the first time Doom has appeared on unexpected hardware. The game has also been made playable on things like a smart lawnmower, a Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 microcontroller, and even an air hockey table. Some resourceful individuals even created an expansion card for the vintage Commodore 64 to give it the power to run Doom.
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