Surely by now you’ve heard it all: Doom running on an alarm clock, inside Fortnite, on a simple PDF, and even on human bacteria. It seems like Doom can run on anything. But what about running Doom on a satellite orbiting the planet while also using images of the Earth taken by the very satellite running the game for the game’s backdrops? Well, some very clever folks managed to pull off that very thing.
Ubuntu Summit is a yearly gathering of Linux professionals and enthusiasts where folks show off cool stuff they’re doing with one of the most popular Linux desktop distributions out there. This year, programmer Ólafur Waage dove into how a bunch of clever folks not only got Doom running on an orbital satellite last year, but also how they were able to replace the game’s background image of the terrain and skies of Hell with photos of Earth taken by the satellite (h/t Tom’s Hardware). It was no easy feat, but it resulted in a new frontier for Doom ports. Check out Waage’s presentation of Doom in space during the summit here (starting at 46:00 or so).
While he was working on a project to get Doom running in C++ as opposed to its original programming language, C, Waage was contacted by Georges Labrèche, a spacecraft operations engineer at the European Space Agency, about the prospect of running Doom on the ESA’s OP-SAT satellite.
OP-SAT presented an excellent opportunity for the ESA, as an experimental platform for unique tests on a device orbiting the Earth made out of (mostly) off-the-shelf computer parts and housed in a device not much larger than a suitcase.
After getting Doom to run without graphical output, as proof it could be done, the team was not only able to get actual graphics running with the game in software rendering mode, but it was also able to swap out Doom’s fictional skybox with real images of the Earth, processed by a machine learning algorithm to adapt to Doom’s strict palette limit of 256 colors. The team had to tweak the color palette a bit to allow for more than Doom usually does, but the results worked. Not only did Doom run in space, but it ran in space while using a skybox featuring images taken by the very satellite it was running on.
So yes, Doom has run on everything and everywhere, including a satellite in space.
