When John Carmack wrote the first lines of Doom’s code, he hardly expected that his creation would one day be launched in space. Three decades later, a group of programmers launched the legendary game on a European Space Agency satellite. It wasn’t – of course – about playing itself. Rather, it is about testing the limits of what is possible in this regard.
OPS-SAT is a microsatellite – a metal box with dimensions of 10 × 10 × 30 cm, weighing only a few kilograms. Despite its size, it has ten times more computing power than typical ESA satellites at launch. However, it is not Earth observation or communication equipment. His role is something completely different – he acts a laboratory for hackerswho tested new software, controls and experimental systems in real orbital conditions.
As part of this unusual initiative, several “firsts” were carried out:
- first training of a machine learning model in space,
- the first chess game in orbit,
- the first stock transaction made from space.
- And finally – the first launch Doom off Earth.
Ólafur Waage’s team took part in the ESA challenge, which aimed to test the limits of the satellite’s capabilities. Each participant had limited access time to the system, so each code run had to be well prepared. Doom, despite its birth in 1993, is not a simple program – requires a set of libraries and dependencies that are not always easy to load onto the “target”.
First attempt using the port Chocolate Doom was a partial success – because the game worked, but without an image. The satellite does not have a screen, and the only trace of the process was text information about the number of defeated opponents. Everything seemed to go smoothly, but there was some discomfort.
Doom overlooking Earth
The second attempt was more ambitious. The band reached for the version doomgenericdesigned to make it easier to port the game to exotic platforms. For visual impact, graphic output was assigned to a virtual video card and screenshots were taken. Then someone came up with a daring idea. If Doom is to operate in space, maybe it would be good to use photos of the Earth (which the satellite delivered to Earth) to present what is happening on the screen?
The on-board OPS-SAT camera provided high-resolution images with great color depth – there was a problem here, because they could not be processed by the game. Artificial intelligence, developed by another team as part of the mission, was used to help. The AI model automatically scaled and reduced the color of photos to 8-bit graphics consistent with the limitations of the game engine.
Color heresy
The problem is that Doom uses a rigid palette of 256 colors – without the shades of blue needed to reproduce the oceans or green lands. So the programmers decided on something that could be considered a complete sacrilege, but let’s face it… in such conditions the team can be forgiven: they modified the original color paletteto match it to the cosmic background. In the world of Doom fans, it’s almost like a desecration, but the effect was worth sinning.
And so, against the background of the hellish structures from Doom, authentic photos of the Earth seen from orbit appeared. Doom may have looked different, but it became a tribute to human, unlimited ingenuity.
An experiment with the future
Running Doom on a satellite doesn’t change the fate of science, it just uses something that was already there. The line between science and wild technological ingenuity is increasingly blurred. Waage’s experiment is perfect proof that limitations only exist within ourselves.
Read also: They even played Doom in a microwave, but there was no such version yet
I’m not surprised by what has been done. But I’m still impressed. This is a logical continuation of the struggle that continues to this day: from time to time, people try to run Doom on all kinds of devices: printers, refrigerators and calculators.
