Doom launched on wireless headphones

Sydney-based enthusiast Arin Sarkisian has created a unique port of the classic game Doom that runs on PineBuds Pro headphones. The project is called Doombuds and is available on GitHub for anyone to use.

How the Doom port works on headphones

Doombuds consists of four parts:

• A Doom port that runs directly on the headphones.
• A serial server that acts as a bridge between the headphones and the web server, and also transcodes the MJPEG stream into Twitch format.
• A web server that serves resources, manages the player queue, transmits keystrokes, and plays the video stream.
• A static web page that tells the browser what to display and how to interact with the server.

Technical limitations and optimizations

The PineBuds Pro headphones do not have a display, so Bluetooth or UART is used for data transfer. Bluetooth limits the speed to ~1 Mbps, which is not enough for smooth video. UART provides 2.4 Mbps, but without compression it is only 3 frames per second.

To improve performance, an MJPEG stream is used, which allows you to display JPEG images sequentially. With additional parameters, the frame rate was increased to 18 FPS.

The modder also overclocked the Cortex-M4F processor from 100 MHz to 300 MHz, disabled low power mode, and increased the available RAM to 992 KB instead of the standard 768 KB. Doom resources were also compressed to 1.7 MB from the original 4.2 MB, which allows you to run the game in the limited memory of the headphones.

Remote play via browser

Doombuds allows you to play Doom remotely via a browser. The project website has a built-in Twitch broadcast and a virtual queue of players. Any user can connect to Sarkisyan’s headphones and control the game remotely.

This experiment demonstrates the unique capabilities of the PineBuds Pro open firmware and the potential of ports of classic games on non-standard devices.