Doom launched on multicooker

A YouTuber managed to run the classic shooter Doom on a Krups Cook4Me smart multicooker after reading and flashing the firmware of the touch control module. The teardown video shows how the game works locally directly on the device’s display without interfering with the power electronics or heating elements.

The “miracle” was made possible by flashing a computer with a touch screen. The starting point was the Cook4Me’s built-in Wi-Fi connection. Looking through the settings menu, the author noticed that “the first three bytes are from Espressif… so there is most likely ESP inside.” It was this observation that prompted the complete disassembly of the device.

How the multicooker works

After opening, it turned out that the hardware part of the Cook4Me is clearly divided. At the bottom is a board with an STM microcontroller that controls the heating relay, temperature measurement and emergency shutdown in case of failures. In fact, this is a separate safe circuit that is responsible only for cooking.

The front module with a touchscreen, connected to the main board with a simple four-wire cable, turned out to be more powerful. The Wi-Fi module here is ESP32, and the main processor of the display board is Renesas R7S721031VZ on Arm architecture, which the author calls a pretty good chip with a lot of GPIO.

Powerful electronics on the display

The touchscreen board also contains 128 MB of flash memory, 128 MB of RAM, a capacitive sensor controller, a display driver, a buzzer, an external EEPROM and even a solderless SD card slot. The ESP32 flash memory was readable, but it turned out to be encrypted. The logs hinted at cloud communication, probably via AWS and MQTT with a private key.

Cracking and flashing

Access to the Renesas main processor was gained via SWD. After connecting the programmer, the author successfully read the flash memory. The bootloader logs allowed the LCD initialization to be reversed, which allowed the author to compile his own firmware and flash the chip. After installing the development environment, Doom was ported to the touchscreen system.

Doom on the Cook4Me display

“After writing enough wrappers around Doom and porting it to firmware, we can run it entirely on a cooking pot. The game runs on the Cook4Me display, and the touchscreen is divided into zones for control, providing a fairly pleasant frame rate,” the author explains.

What this demonstrates

The absurdity of the situation only emphasizes the architecture of modern smart home appliances. The Cook4Me cooking logic is isolated on a simple controller, while the interface, networking functions and screen are served by a more powerful embedded computer. It is this separation that allowed Doom to run on a pressure cooker. Given the history of Doom porting to the most unexpected devices, this is unlikely to be the last strange example, although after launching the game even in space, it becomes increasingly difficult to surprise.