In the 30 years since Doom first blasted its way onto our PCs, it’s been ported to just about every piece of gaming hardware you can imagine. And while playing what remains of the best FPS games to exist on your PC seems like the obvious choice, you can now play the entirety of Doom within a keycap instead.
Getting Doom to run on such a miniscule piece of hardware seems like an impossible task, but Bob of thekeebproject makes it look easy. Bob created his own custom PCB, featuring a Raspberry Pi 2040 microprocessor, in order to get Doom playable on a keycap.
The PCB had to be custom, in order to be small enough to fit inside the size of your average keycap, and runs a modified version of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Doom port, by Graham Sanderson. Along with a 320 x 200px display, a clear resin casing, and some impressive feat of engineering from Bob, the entirety of the classic first-person shooter by id Software can be played.
While seeing Doom running within a tiny keycap is in doubt awe-inspiring, I can’t get over the fact that the game runs entirely isolated from any other hardware, and plays audio to boot. Bob also developed the Doom keycap to be playable through the attachment of another keyboard.
While I’d question the want to play Doom on such a tiny screen, when DOOM still looks great on one of the best gaming monitors of today, it’s still an amazing display of ingenuity.
If you want to try this out for yourself, Bob has made his project open source, so anyone can give it a go. The RP2040 Doom source code is available on GitHub, if you’re up for the challenge, or want to play through the entirety of Doom on the smallest screen possible.
We can’t promise that they can run Doom, but check out the best gaming keyboards if this custom keycap has you inspired. If it’s your mouse that could use the upgrade, check out the best gaming mice and give your PC set up the upgrade it deserves.