(Credit: ading2210)
In the latest edition of “can it run Doom?” a high school student has discovered a way to port the classic PC game to a PDF file.
Although PDF documents are known to simply host text and images, the file format can also run basic games, thanks to its support for JavaScript, according to a high school student named Allen who goes by the screenname "ading2210."
Taking advantage of this, Allen created the Doom PDF, which can run the game if it’s viewed in a Chromium-based browser, such as Google’s Chrome. The Doom PDF is available on Allen’s GitHub page and through a download. The 6.5MB document apparently contains a full version of Doom, which has been open-sourced for nonprofit use.
The document also works by leveraging the Chromium browser’s PDF engine to run JavaScript. However, it does so in a limited format, rendering the game in monochrome using text characters rather than traditional video game pixels.
“This port uses a separate text field for each row in the screen, then it sets their contents to various ASCII characters,” Allen wrote on his GitHub page. “I managed to get a 6 color monochrome output this way, which is enough for things to be legible in-game. The performance of this method is pretty poor but playable, since updating all of that text takes around 80ms per frame.”
The game also lacks audio. But despite the limitations, Allen found the Chromium browser engine does support button and text inputs for PDFs. As a result, the Doom PDF is playable through the built-in buttons in the document and via a text field, which can also read keyboard inputs. That said, the result isn’t easy to play due to the washed-out monochrome graphics. But it does prove once again that Doom can run on almost anything, including ebook readers, smart refrigerators, and even a pregnancy test.
On his GitHub page, Allen also says he was inspired to create the Doom PDF by software developers who’ve also been experimenting with the PDF format, including using it to run Tetris.