The Shores of Bell: Play Doom on Nintendo’s $99 Alarm Clock

Earlier this week, an inventive Twitter user known as GaryOderNichts managed to pull off something quite unexpected: running the classic game Doom on none other than Nintendo’s Alarmo alarm clock. Sharing the success of this quirky project, Gary posted a gameplay video to a Twitter thread, capturing the internet’s attention.

In the thread, Gary explained that the current setup lacks audio, and in order to bypass some memory constraints due to the USB loader, there’s a whole process involving compressing and then decompressing the Doom shareware .wad file. Thankfully, for those curious about trying this themselves, there’s no need to modify your Alarmo. All the necessary project files are conveniently available on GitHub.

Curious about how it all works? Gary elaborated on the process in a detailed blog post. It all began with opening up the Alarmo to understand the hardware inside. At its core, the Alarmo is powered by an STM32H730ZBI6 Arm Cortex-M7 processor, a piece of technology that’s well-documented, making the hacking process a tad more feasible. This hack involved linking the Alarmo to a Raspberry Pi, a popular tool among tech tinkerers.

In the Twitter clip, Gary hints that the community was eager to see Doom in action on the Alarmo, and he delivered. Interestingly, while Gary had to do some soldering and modifications initially, the final version you can find on GitHub is a lot more user-friendly and doesn’t require you to tinker with the Alarmo hardware to run Doom from a USB.

Gameplay controls are ingeniously built around the Alarmo’s existing buttons and a touch dial. The swipe action is employed for aiming, with shooting tied to the notification button on the lower right. Some controls remain unexplored or unused, as seen in the clip showcasing a level from Doom.

Though it’s amusing to see such a pricey device like a $99 alarm clock running Doom, the Alarmo isn’t the first unlikely gadget to host the game. Doom has also made its way onto smart lawnmowers, the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 microcontroller, and even an air hockey table. In one of the more nostalgic feats, someone even crafted an expansion card for the vintage Commodore 64 to handle Doom, proving once again that there’s truly no end to the creativity in the gaming community.