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We’ve seen Doom run on everything from toothbrushes to washing machines, so seeing it run on unusual hardware isn’t so unusual these days. That said, it’s still quite impressive to see that one entrepreneurial engineer has managed to run it on an Anker Prime charger, a device which apparently provides “better than expected” frame rates.
This Anker Prime power bank does have a surprisingly powerful set of specs, even if it isn’t quite on par with the models in our best gaming PC guide. It uses a 2.26-inch LCD display, along with a custom ARM chip with a 150MHz clock speed, 8MB of SDRAM, and 16MB of flash storage, all much better than the specs needed to play the original.
YouTuber Aaron Christophel shared his creation in a recent video. The Anker Prime charger, which retails for $179 on Amazon, is the company’s top desktop charger, featuring a 27,650mAh battery. For Doom’s purposes, however, it’s the 2.26-inch display, with its 480 x 200 pixel resolution, that’s important. So, too, is the processor, a Synwit SWM34S SoC with a 150MHz Arm Cortex-M33 core, which delivers the processing heft for this game to run at all.
The result is yet another gloriously strange way to run Doom. It runs incredibly smoothly on this power bank, with Christophel using the control dial to move around in-game and shoot at enemies. Rotating the dial moves the character left or right, while clicking it pushes to fire. The only downside is the lack of audio which, given this is a glorified battery with a screen, isn’t too surprising.
Other than a few cables attached to a debugging header on the device’s PCB to load the software for the game to run, no hardware mods were necessary to get this working. That’s pretty impressive, and makes me curious to see what other generic tech items I have in my own home could be configured to run this old classic. There’s a whole website dedicated to the challenge, after all.
If you’d like to enter the 21st century, however, you might prefer a gaming rig that can play the latest game in the franchise, Doom The Dark Ages. You’ll need a slightly better machine to run it, but if you’d like to keep it portable, you can check out our best handheld guide for battery-powered options with a little more gaming potential than this Anker charger.
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