Play Doom on your Ikea stuff, it’s possible!

Playing the classic Doom is always fun. But now you can on an Ikea Smart Light Bulb.

We cannot avoid it: going to Ikea on Sunday to get some handy house, garden and kitchen items. It’s even so crazy that there are sometimes traffic jams! But hey, you can certainly find all kinds of beautiful and useful stuff there. And from now on you can play Doom on any of their devices. Better!

Playing Doom at Ikea Bulb

On the internet, hackers have been trying everything with Doom for years. And especially trying to run the game on anything that has a microprocessor. The classic is from 1993 so it has already run on tons of platforms. But now the Ikea Smart Light Bulb is the victim of Doom. More specifically, the Trådfri GU10 345 RGB LED bulb, which Next-Hack managed to hack into to run a modified version of Doom.

It is a different story with the lamp, because the device has no buttons or a display. The previous hacks did. Think of the Nintendo Game & Watch, the MacBook Pro Touch Bar or a TI calculator. Next-Hack had to add that, using the MGM210L RF board that powers the “smart” part of the lamp, and modifying a copy of Doom to run on its paltry 108kB RAM.

Processor

So the hackers had to work to make it workable. Of course, extra storage had to be added, the management of the RAM had to work (better) and the audio now works more optimally. All this has worked and the processor can now handle it. Not only does it have enough power to run Doom, but also to run the modified version. And that for a light bulb…