Doom Video Game

Gaming is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately for many of us, work takes up our valuable time, which should be allocated to our gaming. What if there was a better way? Well, printers can print an image quickly, and receipt printers can print a lot of images. This sounds like an effective display for DOOM in a pinch. [Bringus Studios] managed to find such a printer and got the classic shooter running.

Getting the printer’s attached computer, which was only designed for printing the cost of your chicken sandwich, to run Half-Life was far from easy. [Bringus] struggled through the process of swapping operating systems from Windows 7 to Linux just to return to Windows 7 after a painful process of maintaining compatibility between 32 and 64 bit software. Driver issues followed through the entire process just to get anything running at all.

Back in 2021, the internet briefly lost its collective mind over a very particular headline: rats had been trained to play Doom — specifically, Doom II. Four years later, the project is back with a substantial update, and this time it's less of a novelty and more of something that actually resembles gameplay. Kind of. Especially now that an added trigger mechanism allows the rats, which see their way around the game with new wraparound AMOLED screens, to shoot.

The project, led by neuroengineer Viktor Tóth, has evolved into a second-generation setup that significantly expands what the rats can do inside the Doom engine. The original version used a clever but limited configuration: rats stood in a harness over a freely rotating ball, with forward movement mapped to movement through a simplified Doom II corridor. Rewards came in the form of sweetened water dispensed when the rat performed the desired action. It worked, but only that; there was no real interaction with the game's mechanics, so calling it "playing Doom" was overstating the case a bit.

Anyone have recommendations on map packs for DOOM 1? Conversions you enjoy?

And if anyone wants to chat: I just finished my very first "casual" playthrough of DOOM ep 1-4 (haven't touched Sigil yet), and while I loved the first couple episodes, it felt like it lost momentum towards the end. Instead of intuitive level design they kinda just throw everything they can at the player. I missed the secrets you could "figure out" vs the "spam the Use button against every wall" type. Is it just me? Does DOOM II continue that trend?