Modder gets Doom working on RF module from IKEA Trådfri lamp – update

A modder has ported the first Doom game from 1993 to an IKEA smart lamp. A YouTube user named next-hack got the game working on the RF module from an IKEA Trådfri GU10 RGB lamp.

Next-hack shows in a video how he uses Silicon Lab’s MGM210L module to play the iconic shooter. This RF module has a Cortex-M33 core running at 80MHz. In addition, the chip only has 108kB of ram.

The original release of Doom already required 4MB of memory. forcing next-hack Doom to make major adjustments to limit memory usage. He used the Game Boy Advance port of doomhack as a basis for this. The module also had insufficient storage capacity. The modder therefore provided the module with external storage in the form of additional SPI flash memory.

The IKEA lamp in question obviously has no input devices or screen. The modder therefore demolished the RF module from the lamp, and connected it to a breakout board with a homemade controller. Via the same breakout board, next hack connected the Silicon Lab chip to a 1.8″ screen with a resolution of 160×128 pixels.

With that, the modder got the game running at a fairly stable frame rate of 30 fps. The game includes support for audio effects and all shareware maps. Bobby Prince’s music is missing from the IKEA Trådfri version of the iconic shooter. Doom’s multiplayer is also not playable on the smart lamp.

Next-hack shared more in-depth details about his project on HackADay, where he goes into his hardware choices and tweaking the Doom source code, among other things. The Doom port for the IKEA lamp is also on GitHub, so anyone can recreate this project if necessary.

Update, Tuesday 10:16: The project seems to have been taken offline in its entirety. The YouTube video is currently marked private and the GitHub and HackADay pages are also gone. It is not clear why this happened.