Doom now runs on potato power

[Boleskine]

https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-doom-running-on-100-pounds-of-moldy-potatoes/

Here's Doom running on 100 pounds of moldy potatoes
By Christopher Livingston 3 hours ago

Potatoes plus zinc equals electricity. But how many do you need to get Doom running?

(Image credit: Equalo on YouTube)
We've seen Doom running on printers, smart watches, digital cameras, and even on an ATM. Impressive as these feats are, the unlikely hardware running Doom in all these cases are getting their electricity from traditional sources.

Anyone who's been through grade school science class can probably tell you that potatoes can be used to generate electricity. Stick some zinc and copper into a potato, and the potato's acids and salts essentially act as a chemical battery. Line up enough potatoes and you can use them to power something, though even with several potatoes you'll only have enough power for something very small.

Equalo, over the course of several long days and nights in his potato-filled garage, decided to find out.

Equalo set out to get Doom running on a Raspberry Pi Zero, calculating he'd need about 770 slices of potatoes to generate the 100-120 milliamps and 5 volts required. He brought home 100 pounds of potatoes, boiled them (which increases the amperage), sliced them, and wired them up. Then he plugged in the Raspberry Pi.

And... it didn't work. Despite pulling roughly enough amperage from those sliced potatoes, the tiny computer just wouldn't boot. But Equalo wasn't ready to give up.



Unfortunately, over the next few days of tinkering, all those cooked potatoes began generating more than just electricity. They started growing mold. Choking on the stink, Equalo finally had to give up on the Raspberry Pi and decided to try powering a TI-84 graphing calculator instead. He removed the batteries and hooked up the big, stinky, rotting potato battery.

Finally, success! After six days of labor and a garage full of potato stank, Doom was running on 100% potato power. While he was pleased with his experiment, Equalo discovered one unfortunate side-effect.

"So, I hate potatoes now," he says in the video. "That's saying a lot. I live in Idaho."

 

[taxalot]

100 rotten potatoes run Doom, but 450 crunching potatoes make Cyberpunk 2077.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Aspergers is a hell of a thing.

 

[Semiurge]

100 rotten potatoes run Doom, but 450 crunching potatoes make Cyberpunk 2077.

They will have to, or else they're fried.

 

[User was nabbed fit]

Wake me up when he manages to run Crysis on it.

 

[Filthy Sauce]

100 rotten potatoes run Doom, but 450 crunching potatoes make Cyberpunk 2077.

They will have to, or else they're fried.

 

[Caim]

Aspergers is a hell of a thing.

No, they run on potatos and not asparagus. Are you dyslectic?

 

[Machocruz]

It is not the potatoes that powered Doom, it is Doom that powered the potatoes.

 

[Citizen]

 

[Shaewaroz]

Fake News. It's not the real Doom, it's just some garbage calculator port. We need a REAL MAN to actually make the real Doom run on potatoes, not some lazy ass quitter like this guy.

 

[vortex]

I always play games on potato PC with lowest graphical settings.

Did they try to run Doom Eternal on potatos?

 

[Boleskine]

https://www.pcgamer.com/forget-the-potatoes-and-pregnancy-test-doom-runs-on-twitter-now/

Forget the potatoes and pregnancy test: Doom runs on Twitter now
By Andy Chalk 5 days ago

The Tweet2Doom bot takes inputs via tweets and then spits out gameplay in replies.

(Image credit: id Software)

Doom runs on a lot of things. Here it is on an Intel Edison chip, which is actually quite mundane as these things go; far more impressive is seeing it in action on a home pregnancy test, 100 pounds of moldy potatoes, the display that shows your order in a restaurant, and even some sheep in Minecraft. Here's a whole separate list if you really want to go down that rabbit hole.

The most recent addition to the lineup of "weird things running Doom" is nothing less than Twitter, and specifically the Tweet2Doom bot that enables anyone with a bit of patience to play the game directly through the social media platform. Movement and interactions are handled through a basic scripting language that's input via reply tweets sent to the bot; those instructions are converted into a gameplay video that's sent to the user in a tweet. Each valid tweet also generates a "new game state" that can be extended through further replies, meaning that gameplay sessions can be extended across tweet threads.

The process is simple, although there are a few syntax rules and you'll need to be patient enough to figure out how the scripting works. To start a new game, you must reply-tweet "/play x,,e,,e,,e,,50-,50-u,15-f," for instance. Okay, so maybe it's not that simple.

Here are the full instructions:



Success is possible, though. In a thread leading up to the tweet below, bot author @ggerganov and @ASPIRINmoe were able to make it all the way through E1M1 and into E1M2. It's ugly, but it works.



The secret, as far as I can tell, is to take it in small bites: Move a bit, shoot a bit, see how the game world reacts, and then respond accordingly. You can see that in the thread above, where they move in small segments, take on individual threats wherever possible, and ensure they're in a good position for subsequent tweets.

Of course, there's always the speedrun approach:



An interactive roadmap of all the Twitter Doom runs is up on Github, where you can see all the dead-end runs (including mine, which was just a cut-and-paste of someone else's script commands to see how it all worked) and a couple of very long strings that are presumably more interesting and successful. Clicking on any of the names on the map (which can be dragged and zoomed using a mouse) will take you to Twitter, where you can see that particular slice of Doom gameplay.

It's definitely not the most practical way to play Doom, but it's fun to watch and see how the runs expand over multiple tweets. Will anyone ever make it all the way to the end of the game like this? My inclination is to say "no," but I've been around long enough to know that someone will probably pull it off—the only real question is when.

 

[deuxhero]

What's stopping someone from just pasting TAS inputs to clear it?

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Damn, he totally could have done it up right with the Raspberry Pi. He just needed a little power conditioning, the potatoes probably don't have the best voltage ripple specs. Throw a couple capacitors and resistors at the problem for like $2.00 and he would have had it.

Oh well, I don't know if he's ever getting that stink out. Rotten potatoes are nasty and they tend to get runny.