Welcome to another installment of “What Weird Thing Has Someone Ported Doom To This Week?” This time, it’s a user on Reddit who has translated the game into an audio signal that can be displayed by a spectrogram.
Getting Doom to run on devices that were never intended to play games has long been a popular hobby among the ‘90s shooter’s biggest fans and modders. We’ve seen Doom running on tractors, ATMs, pregnancy tests, and even on Twitter via tweets. The world seems dedicated to getting Doom ported to just about every device and format ever created (or that will be created), so it almost makes sense that someone turned Doom into an audio signal that can be deciphered with special hardware.
As spotted by Destructoid, Reddit user Wojtek-Graj was able to create a version of Doom that is playable using only audio. Now, that wouldn’t be much to look at, so they hooked up a spectrogram—a device that visually represents sound waves—to visualize the demon-infested audio.
“The game is displayed by generating an audio signal that can be viewed as a spectrogram, while input is taken from the microphone, with specific frequencies being mapped to specific keys,” explained Wojtek-Graj.
In their post on the ItRunsDoom subreddit—a place dedicated to folks sharing all the weird ports of Doom out there—the creator of this audio-only version of the game seemed nervous to share it as it’s technically not running on a new device, it’s just that you need the spectrogram to actually see what’s happening.
As you might expect, nobody was upset about Wojtek-Graj sharing such a cool port of Doom on the subreddit. And for those of you wanting to play Doom in a really odd way and who also have a spectrogram lying around your house, good news: Wotjek-Graj has uploaded the source code for this Doom port onto Github as well as full instructions for how to set it up.
Now, we can all cross off “spectrogram” from the list of devices that can play Doom. What will be the next device that can play Doom? Take your bets now.
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