Running Doom on Our Custom CPU and Going Viral
Two developers successfully ported the classic game Doom to a custom-built CPU running on an FPGA. The project involved overcoming significant hardware limitations, including memory constraints and processing speed, by implementing complex architectural solutions.
Why it matters
It demonstrates the technical ingenuity required in hardware engineering and the ongoing hobbyist interest in low-level computing architecture.
Two weeks ago we successfully ran(crawled) Doom on a CPU we built from scratch. To be honest, I still can't believe it. What did we really do though? Well, we designed a custom CPU at the logic gate level, connected it to peripherals, adapted the DOOM source code to run on our machine, and deployed it onto an FPGA to run in real time. Before running Doom, we had only run simple programs that we had written, like Pong and Mandelbrot sets. Now we can run full published games, but getting here was a rather rocky road.
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