DOOM game launched in PCB designer

Developer Michael Ailes has introduced an unusual experiment by bringing DOOM to the PCB design environment. The project is called KiDOOM, a portmanteau of KiCad, a free and open-source software for circuit board design, and the iconic 1993 shooter DOOM. In this version, the game runs directly in the board editing window, where KiCad acts as a visualizer. The DOOM game engine itself runs as a separate process, but all graphics are rendered inside the design program.

How it works

KiDOOM’s visual style looks unusual and immediately evokes associations with the era of arcade machines such as Atari Battlezone, or with the aesthetics of Vectrex. Ailes went further, replacing standard enemies with conventional electronic components: demons and zombies are depicted as QFP-64 packages, cartridges as small SOT-3. Even the explosive barrels, torches and “dead bodies” are represented by elements in the SOIC-8 package. As a result, the game world looks as if it was created from neon tracks of a printed circuit board.

A feature of KiDOOM is that each frame of the game is a full-fledged board project, which can theoretically be manufactured. Instead of a regular screenshot, you can get a physical board, more like a souvenir, since it has no practical application, but the fact itself gives the game a certain absurd charm.

How to Play Doom in a PCB Design Environment

KiDOOM offers three rendering modes and a six-step rendering sequence. Ailes explains that the DOOM engine first considers geometry as vectors, and the circuit board tracing is also based on vector lines. Therefore, only 100-300 lines per frame are required for rendering instead of tens of thousands of pixels, which provides unexpectedly high speed.

The developer tested KiDOOM on various systems and noted acceptable smoothness. On a MacBook Pro with an M1 chip, the game produces about 15-25 frames per second, and on a configuration with a Core i7 and RTX 3050 Ti – about 18-28 frames. It is not yet clear whether more powerful hardware will be able to increase performance; there may be other bottlenecks in the rendering. For those who want to try it themselves, Ailes described in detail the KiCad settings, without which performance drops by 2-5 times.

The KiDOOM project is not focused on comfortable gameplay, its meaning lies in technical curiosity and creativity. The experiment shows how flexible modern circuit design tools can be and how much fans are willing to go into experiments when interest outweighs common sense. This is another reminder that classic DOOM runs on almost any computing platform, even in a printed circuit board editor. Previously, the game has already been run on video cards, alarm clocks, chargers, pregnancy tests, masturbators, and even with the help of intestinal bacteria.