I think it's fair to say they're playing Doom on the lamp (and even more impressively, it's not a whole lamp, but just a light bulb!). They use an external keyboard, monitor, speakers, and storage for the game data, but the processor and RAM are from the original bulb.

If someone said "I'm playing Doom on my PC" in 1993, they would also have been using an external keyboard, monitor, and speakers. And the game would have shipped on external storage (floppy disks).

Before clicking I assumed the lamp had a small screen and they were using that screen...

I was hoping to see them running a 1-pixel version of doom on an RGB bulb.

Was hoping they stuck the light behind a Nipkow Disk. I didn't really expect it to happen, but I still want to see it.

Actually, the correct technical term for "lightbulb" is "lamp", and the correct term for "lamp" is "fixture" :)

Maybe in your language, but looking at my English dictionary it clearly says a lamp is a device for jibing light consisting of a bulb, holder and shade.

Historically a lamp would consist of the wick, oil and holder.

From wikipedia (Electric light): " In technical usage, a replaceable component that produces light from electricity is called a lamp." EDIT: Yes, later in the same page: "Lamps are commonly called light bulbs;"

"In technical usage" means that this level of nitpicking isn't really accurate. When you say "they ran doom on a lamp" that isn't a piece of scientific literature. It's just conversational English and as such using the common dictionary definition of the word lamp as opposed to a technical definition is entirely appropriate.

I think that the goal of the project is not "Doom running on a 40-Cortex M4" (actually an 80 M33...), which is pretty easy I guess, but "Doom running with only 108 kB of RAM", while keeping all the features (which is pretty hard, I guess). I recall that I had to bend over backwards to get it running on my 386 with only 4MB RAM.

The game is cheating a little bit, since it loads a lot of read-only data from external SPI flash memory, and all the code is in the internal 1MB flash. On your 386, everything including the OS had to fit on that 4MB RAM.

It also doesn't have quite all the features. No music, and no screen wipe effect (I worked on a memory constrained Doom port myself, and that silly little effect is incredibly memory intensive since you need two full copies of the frame buffer)

Overlays were a thing in DOS days, as well. Not for Doom specifically, but I've seen quite a few 16-bit games using them.

They're too slow for action games like Doom.

Not everything, only what’s relevant to the individual levels.

Agreed. The actual lamp isn't... the thing. It's just reusing a chip with a monitor.

A playstation doesn't have a monitor, controller, loudspeaker etc. built in. It's all external stuff you have to plug in before you can play.

Still, we say "I'm playing Doom on my playstation".

Ehhhh. Those things are meant to plug right in. I've never had to solder together my own breakout board and carrier board to hook a Playstation up to a TV while breaking the Playstation's main features in the process. That lightbulb is completely disassembled and won't function as a lightbulb anymore. And nothing they added was plug-n-play.

Edit: It's still a fun and cool project. But more like running Doom on hardware salvaged from an IKEA lamp.

You also say you are "playing video games on my playstation" which doesn't make much technical sense, so clearly appeals to common idioms aren't without problems.

In any case, the argument is that the mini console they built is no longer a lamp, not that you can't play games on a console.

Maybe this could be a new take on "a modern pocket calculator has far more computing power than the moon landing systems in '69". A modern lavalamp has as much computing power as my mid 90s desktop PC.

Thanks for the reference. I’ve pondered this for many years in the context of sports teams. If you can replace all the players, owners, coaches, logo, stadium, etc.. what are you really a fan of?

Yeah, "Game that ran on an 8MHz Arm in 1993 running on a 40MHz Arm in 2021" wouldn't have been as attention-grabbing.

* "Game that ran in a 486 @ 66 MHz (for the same fps), with 4 MB RAM in 1993 running on a 80 MHz Cortex M33, with 0.108 MB RAM"

tbf they ported a low RAM version, specifically the GBA version, not the original one.

So the OP is not entirely wrong: they ported a game played on a 16.8Mhz system with 256kb of RAM to a 80Mhz with 108Kb of RAM.

The writeup explicitly says «we could trade off some computing power of the 80Mhz Cortex M33 to save memory»

Still the original Doom features are all there, except multiplayer. They also restored some missing graphics features of the GBA port, like z-depth lighting. Yes 4MB vs 108kB is more impressive than 256k vs 108k, but cutting in half the memory requirements is still notewhorty.

So a port of a port isn't a port?

At a quarter the resolution.