The Doom Game Controller Challenge

The popular 1990s game Doom has become a way to both check the performance of small computers and to display hacking wizardry. It runs on the Arduino Portenta H7 too, but you can’t play it because the board has no buttons. If you design a game controller for it, you can win a prize.

Doom, released in 1993 by id Software, is probably one of the most sold computer games in history. It is a first-person shooter game, where the player navigates though a 3D space and confronts different enemies using different weapons and ammunition. Doom has been ported to many operating systems, but it also runs on bare metal on multiple systems. The source code is open, currently licensed under GPL. While it is not trivial to compile it, some versions of the game run on very small computers and also inside other programs.

The game has become a way to both check the performance of small computers and to display hacking wizardry. Therefore, when the first prototype of the Portenta H7 was built, Doom was used to test the technical capabilities of the board.

Design a Game Controller and Win a Prize!

Running the game on the Portenta H7 is not for playing but serves as a kind of reference video stream, so humans can check it for anomalies. The game is fully playable, though. However, the Portenta H7 does not have buttons to control the game. In this video, David Cuartielles calls the community to design a Doom Game Controller using the Arduino Portenta. You can even win a prize, awarded by the co-founder of Arduino. Interested in learning how? Check out the video for more information.