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You can now play Doom without even loading your PC

CoreDoom is a Doom port to the Coreboot system firmware, which means that it's now possible to play Doom directly from your startup BIOS without DOS or Windows

Even this imp is impressed by this Doom BIOS port

There are Doom ports to everything under the sun, from Game & Watch to Minecraft to a digital camera, so being able to run the classic FPS game on a regular PC isn’t that impressive – but it is if you’ve barely turned it on. The latest Doom port allows you to run it directly from a PC BIOS firmware, making Doom more important than Windows.

Doom is one of the most famous all-time classic old PC games and it’s still perfectly playable today, but for some reason, the entire world is obsessed with bringing it to as many platforms as possible – from tiny PCs to a SEGA Genesis to a restaurant. And now, it’s playable as part of a system BIOS.

Coreboot is an open-source BIOS system firmware, and update 4.17 is out today (via Toms Hardware). It supports a load of new motherboards, a new bootloader, and, yes, Doom. Users can create ‘payloads’ to add ROM code to Coreboot, including some basic games that load up in the linear frame-buffer – and now, someone’s made Doom for it.

If you give it a go, expect it to be crash-heavy and only be playable through PS/2 keyboards, as well as having no sound, saves, and only basic graphics. Nevertheless, it’s still Doom running on a system BIOS, so we can check that one off the list of “things that Doom still isn’t playable on.”

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More unexpected things that Doom is playable on include: a pregnancy test, Twitter, a GoPro drone controller, and lots of crabs. It’s only a matter of time until you can play Doom on PCGamesN too. Oh, wait.

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