Over the years, hackers and modders at large have made it their mission to port classic first-person shooter Doom to practically anything with a display. Recently, though, coder Arin Sarkisan has taken the "Can it Run Doom?" idea in an unlikely direction: wireless earbuds that aren't designed to output graphics at all.

To be clear, this hack doesn't apply to any generic set of earbuds. The "Doombuds" project is designed specifically for the PineBuds Pro, which are unique in featuring completely open source firmware and a community-maintained SDK.

That means Sarkisan was able to code up a JavaScript interface that uses the earbuds' UART contact pads to send a heavily compressed MJPEG video stream to a web server (via a serial server). The 2.4 MB/s data stream from the UART connection can put out about 22 to 27 frames per second in this format, which is more than enough for a CPU that can only run the game at a maximum of 18 fps anyway.

Read full article

Comments