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PhD student manages to get Doom running on cells (2,88 frames a day)

Draugoth

Gold Member
doom-running-on-cells.jpg
Well, it’s been about a hundredth of a femtosecond, let’s see what people are trying to port Doom onto now. Oh my, would you look at that! It appears as though it’s possible to get id Software’s iconic FPS to “run” on cells.

In a meeting of technology and biology, PhD student Lauren “Ren” Ramlan at MIT (as shared by Reddit user AnNdPh) has figured out a way to use E. coli cells to sort of run Doom. Now, I’m not scientifically minded, so I don’t fully understand how they do it.



In a nutshell: what they’ve been able to do is tweak or modify the cells to – for want of a better term – turn them into monitor pixels. This has then allowed them to display the game in a very rudimentary way.
 

Shifty1897

Member
I love this video and hope she gets an A or whatever doctoral MIT students get that is considered a good grade...

...BUT I have to point out that she's not really running Doom on cells, she's just displaying Doom on cells. She built a 1-bit display, not a computer that can run an application. Still super cool.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
You get a lot of these things where people can run Doom off a photocopier or calculator.

Is there something special about Doom coding that makes it portable to every device? Or simply a meme where anyone wanting to covert a game simply chooses Doom to one up the next guy?
 

Dacvak

No one shall be brought before our LORD David Bowie without the true and secret knowledge of the Photoshop. For in that time, so shall He appear.
Big deal. Sony already got Doom 3 running on their cell processor too.
 

keraj37

Contacted PSN to add his card back to his account
Is something special about Doom coding that makes it portable to every device? Or simply a meme where anyone wanting to covert a game simply chooses Doom to one up the next guy?

Yes, it was coded by a genius from ID software, Carmack himself, and the code is very optimized and clean, therefor porting is is relatively easy.
 
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