We’ve had Doom running on a McDonald’s cash register, now someone’s got the classic FPS game booted up through the display system for a restaurant.
This slightly offbeat Doom port comes from This Does Not Compute, a YouTube channel dedicated to exploring and examining retro tech. the hardware is an IPadSX from Oasys – not to be confused with Apple’s iPad – a tool that forms the spine of order displays you see in restaurants. Whenever you go to a fast food place, and see people’s orders on certain screens, showing the contents of the order, where it is in the queue and so on, many of them are running some version of this thing. The boxes have built-in commands, an you operate it through surface buttons.
Another video gets into the weeds of what the IPadSX is actually made of, but the important part is that it runs X-Dos, an MS-Dos variant, and a lot of its capabilities are diminished because, well, it’s only meant to take and list information. Getting around this to a bootable operating system proved taxing. Using SD cards and USB keys, trying to get it working on Windows 98 or Windows XP didn’t work. What eventually does the job is putting MS-Dos 6.22 on it. Slots on the IPadSX allow for a keyboard to be hooked up, and voila, using only the PC speaker, it very much runs Doom.
If you’ve a keyboard, a monitor, a USB key, and access to one of these things, you can try it yourself. This Does Not Compute ends up using an unmodified version of the tool to complete the task.
Here’s the full odyssey:
Recently, we had Doom on a digital camera, and Doom on a regular Sega Genesis, among the long list of strange ports. What next for the old game? We’ll just have to wait and see.