Doomba turns Roomba navigation data into a Doom level

The moment no one was waiting for has arrived. It is now possible to convert your home to a Doom map using your Roomba. The Doomba tool even fills the room with a variety of enemies, weapons, textures and all that other stuff that fills Doom levels.

Rich Whitehouse was looking for a Roomba 980 to keep his house clean and found in the course of his research that “the newer Roombas have a pretty respectable implementation of slam”. Rich knew enough and got to work. “I realized it was an obvious opportunity to serve the Dark Lord by concocting an array of dark algorithms for one of the greatest works ever created in his name.” That could only be Doom.

Doomba connects to the Roomba via the LAN and retrieves the slam card data from the robot. These are converted into a Doom folder; walls are walls, furniture becomes platforms. After that, the tool can combine cards if necessary, generate a pwad file and fill it with anything Doom-esque: weapons, ammunition, explosive barrels and enemies. This can even be randomly generated for those who just want to get started quickly.

As a bonus, Rich has also created a tool called Image to NoeRoomba with the knowledge gained. It turns 2D images into a Doom map, although it warns that it has not been tested particularly extensively.

“Hope you guys get some fun out of this feature. I certainly do. Some will say it’s useless, but I’m confident the Dark Lord will soon wipe these people off the face of the earth and put them in a dimension of eternal hellfire stops.”

Doom is more often the subject of .Geek-esque scenes. For example, a modder has added loot boxes to Doom, Doom runs on the Touch Bar of the MacBook Pro and, to complete the circle, Doom can even run within Doom.