How to get Doom running on a pair of earbuds

Squeezing the entirety of Doom onto modern earbuds wasn’t an easy task, either. The 4.2MB of game data won’t quite fit on the PineBuds’ 4MB of flash memory, for instance. That means the project needed to use a 1.7MB “squashware” build of Doom, which eliminates some animation frames and shortens some music tracks to make the game even more portable.

The earbuds also have just under 1MB of RAM, requiring the coding of a new version of the game that optimizes away many of the bits that usually fill up a full 4MB of RAM in the standard game. “Pre-generating lookup tables, making variables const, reading const variables from flash, disabling DOOM’s caching system, removing unneeded variables… it all adds up,” Sarkisan writes.

For those without their own PineBuds to test this wild idea, Sarkisan has set up an interactive Twitch stream that players can queue up to control for 45-second sessions via doombuds.com. It’s a great little break-time diversion, especially for people ready to marvel that a set of $70 earbuds can now run a game that required a $1,000-plus computer tower a few decades ago.