A goddamned tractor? Yeah, it runs Doom. Directly quoting iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens on Twitter, reporting live from DefCon 2022 in Las Vegas: “ Sick Codes has jailbroken a John Deere, and this is just the beginning. Turns out our entire food system is...
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A goddamned tractor? Yeah, it runs Doom.

Directly quoting iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens on Twitter, reporting live from DefCon 2022 in Las Vegas:

Sick Codes has jailbroken a John Deere, and this is just the beginning. Turns out our entire food system is built on outdated, unpatched Linux and Windows CE hardware with LTE modems.

John Deere has repeatedly told regulators that farmers can’t be trusted to repair their own equipment. This foundational work will pave the path for farmers to retake control of the equipment that they own.

And yes, that is corn-themed Doom running on a John Deere touchscreen. sickcodes really went all out for this. You can harvest corn to raise your health or go hunt down the piggies!

Putting together a themed mod for your security-exploit demonstration is a whole new level from what we usually see. Kudos!

Thanks to Linguica for bringing this to my attention!

The Game Boy Advance? It almost ran Quake.

A tech demo by the great Randy Linden, whose name may be familiar to you, showing off some very advanced visuals for the hardware at a fairly decent clip. By the time the engine had been whipped into shape, though, the world had moved onto newer platforms, so Randy took what he had and turned it into an original game that continues to be updated to this day.

Bonus Trivia: The level designer for this tech demo was Wouter van Oortmerssen, later to become the creator of the Cube and Sauerbraten game engines!

An Easter Egg has been found in the Saturn port of Doom, lurking under the surface for a full quarter-century. To quote discoverer MattFrie1:

Enter “jb4jh*****” for Rage Special Credits and “lyjvm*****” for Sega Special Credits at the password screen (The asterisks can be any value). After it flashes “invalid password” just press the start button to display the credits. Pretty sure this has remained undiscovered for all these years.

EDIT: Seems like this Easter egg is a bit more difficult to enable than just entering passwords. From what I have discovered so far the credits will only display after Map 02 (Plant) has been loaded into memory. Trying to use the passwords from any other map or from starting up the game after powering the system on will not trigger the hidden screens. I’ve also discovered that the last 5 characters of the password can be any character, just as long as the first 5 characters are the ones listed above.

Thanks to MattFrie1 for finding this!

EDIT: Updated with more accurate means of discovery.

TempleOS? Yeah, it runs Doom.

If you don’t know the strange, sad story of this homebrewed, solo-effort operating system, well, uh, that’s well beyond the scope of this humble, barely-updated blog. I’d definitely recommend looking up the Down The Rabbit Hole episode, but be warned: It is extremely not an easy watch.

Anyway, it runs Chocolate Doom now.

Thanks to /u/TheRedstoneblock for the video footage.

An edge computing service? Yeah, it runs Doom. More from the “Just for Fun” files: An engineer at Fastly, an Edge Computing service, documents crowbarring Doom into Fastly’s Compute@Edge service, which, it turns out, was very unsuited to such a...
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An edge computing service? Yeah, it runs Doom.

More from the “Just for Fun” files: An engineer at Fastly, an Edge Computing service, documents crowbarring Doom into Fastly’s Compute@Edge service, which, it turns out, was very unsuited to such a thing. 

In order to get the common code running on Compute@Edge, I had to refactor the traditional game loop that DOOM employed. A typical game will initialize and then run in an endless loop, doing an input->simulation->output tick over and over at the desired frequency, taking inputs from the local input devices such as a keyboard, mouse, or controller, and outputting video and audio. On Compute@Edge, however, a process like this will eventually be evicted by the platform, since the intent is for the instance to start up, do some work, and then return to the caller. I thus removed the loop entirely and changed the instance to only run a single frame of the game.

Workarounds ensure!

Thanks Linguica for bringing this to my attention!