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Earlier this week, a Twitter user who goes by the handle GaryOderNichts shared a remarkable achievement—he got the Nintendo Alarmo alarm clock to run the shareware version of Doom. He posted a video showcasing the gameplay, along with a detailed thread explaining how it was done.
Gary mentioned in the thread that, at the moment, there’s no sound support. Additionally, to navigate around the memory constraints of the USB loader, the Doom shareware .wad file needs to be compressed and then decompressed in memory when the system boots up. Interestingly, if you’re keen to try this out yourself, Gary assures you won’t need to alter your Alarmo. The necessary project files are readily accessible on GitHub.
Curious about how this was accomplished? Gary elaborates in a comprehensive blog post that the project kicked off by dismantling an Alarmo to inspect its internal components. Inside, he found an STM32H730ZBI6 Arm Cortex-M7 processor, a piece of hardware that’s thankfully well-documented. This finding enabled him to hack into the Alarmo and connect it to a Raspberry Pi.
The process did require some technical tinkering, like soldering and modifying, but the version Gary eventually made available on GitHub is much simpler. You don’t need to modify the Alarmo to launch Doom from a USB.
Playing Doom on the Nintendo Alarmo involves using the controls located on top of the device—two buttons and a touch-sensitive dial that you can both press and swipe. In this adaptation, you swipe to aim left and right, while the notification button on the lower right serves as your shooting mechanism. The demo video focuses on one of Doom’s initial levels, but other controls remain undocumented or were not utilized in this presentation.
The concept of playing Doom on unorthodox devices isn’t entirely new. While seeing it on a $99 Nintendo Alarmo clock might be surprising, Doom has also made its way onto various unlikely platforms. It’s been played on a smart lawnmower, a Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 microcontroller, and even on an air hockey table. In perhaps the most unexpected twist, someone crafted an expansion card for the old Commodore 64 to give it the capabilities needed to run Doom.
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