Doom was launched in the operating system loader – now it will be easier to port the game

Porting Doom to run on equipment that was never intended for this has long been a real sport, wherever the cult shooter was not launched – on the retro console Game & Watch; on a Samsung refrigerator, on a calculator with a battery of potatoes and a bucket of nails; on a virtual PC inside Minecraft, and so on.

Getting the game to run on embedded devices, ancient computers, virtual systems, and old consoles is fine. Still, everyone was expecting something versatile that didn’t need a custom solution for every piece of hardware. Something like Doom running right in the bootloader.

This is the solution proposed by Ahmad Fatoum – his version of Barsoom works to install the universal Barebox bootloader (aka U-Boot-v2 in the past) – it is a computer operating system loader focused on embedded devices with ARM architecture, Blackfin, MIPS, Nios II, and x86. It is distributed under the GNU GPL v2 license, and its main task is to start from the built-in ROM of the computing system, analyze the hardware and start the OS. It can be a system based on an i.MX6 processor, a laptop with UEFI, or even a RISC-V emulator.

Now that Doom is running on that bootloader, the shooter can essentially run anywhere with minimal effort. However, enthusiasts may need to make some settings of bareDOOM for specific hardware, which is not supported by standard tools. Those who are already working with Barebox can download the bareDOOM code from the GitHub page.