News: 0175400617

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Newest Device To Run Doom: Nintendo's Alarm Clock

(Monday November 04, 2024 @05:50PM (msmash) from the mission-accomplished dept.)


A hardware hacker has successfully modified [1]Nintendo's $100 Alarmo device to run the classic video game Doom, marking another milestone in the gaming community's tradition of porting the 1993 shooter to unconventional devices.

YouTuber GaryOderNichts [2]demonstrated the 2.8-inch circular alarm clock running Chocolate Doom natively, using the device's wheel for movement and side buttons for weapons. The hack requires no hardware modifications and works on the current 2.0 software version. The hack came after researchers discovered vulnerabilities in the Alarmo's STM32H7 microcontroller, enabling custom firmware installation through its USB-C port. The trick omits audio due to memory restrictions, GaryOderNichts notes, but it allows for custom animations and displays.



[1] https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/10/09/1521230/nintendo-announces-new-hardware-a-100-alarm-clock

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IOVYvSMAoU


Alarmo's usefulness just increased (Score:2)

by GoTeam ( 5042081 )

Alarmo with Doom is 500x better than Alarmo without Doom! So if Alarmo scores zero on the usefulness, 0 x 500=.............

Enough RAM (Score:2)

by Teun ( 17872 )

OK, a 1993 game will by modern standards need little memory but that a clock has enough to run it is quite a thing.

I mean, most companies try to skimp on hardware wherever they can and surely this alarm could have done with less RAM.

Re: (Score:2)

by DarkOx ( 621550 )

could it though? The thing has to be able to decode relatively high fidelity, presumable compressed (to save on flash) audio samples and display images that likely also need some degree of processing to have the hands or numbers overlayed etc.

Are there ways to play sounds and show images with less than few MegaBytes of memory - sure but I am not sure they are any cheaper to do with the fidelity the modern electronics consumer is expecting..

I just remain amazed in 2025, alarm clocks (even if they are somewh

Re: (Score:3)

by test321 ( 8891681 )

Simplified sprites of Doom have been shown to work on an Arduino Nano with 2 kbytes total RAM. [1]https://github.com/daveruiz/do... [github.com] A port of the full game runs on 512 kbytes of RAM [2]https://blog.arduino.cc/2023/0... [arduino.cc] Since the Nintendo alarm clock has a large colour screen, they probably can't even find components that would handle the screen and not have resources for some port of Doom.

[1] https://github.com/daveruiz/doom-nano

[2] https://blog.arduino.cc/2023/09/12/your-arduino-nano-es32-can-run-doom/

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