'I know how stupid this is, but it had to be done': YouTuber gets Doom to run on touchscreen cooking pot

Internet of things (IoT) devices both repulse and intrigue me. I say 'repulse' because, hoo-NELLY, these simple, WiFi enabled devices are surprisingly easy to leverage into malicious activity, such as botnets. And yet, such an abundance of hardware in a relatively simple device is also what makes them all the more compelling to tinker with—especially by, say, coaxing an unlikely kitchen device into running Doom.

Case in point, German tech creator Aaron Christophel has got the original boomer shooter working on the touch screen of the Krups Cook4Me Smart cooking pot. It proves surprisingly easy to dismantle the kitchen appliance, with the bottom separating the heating elements from your counter top secured by a single screw (conversely, the separate touch screen module is firmly held in place with a whole two screws).

The cooking pot's 'smarts' are down to the Renesas R7S721031VC SoC (system on a chip), which uses a 400 MHz Cortex-A9 microprocessor. Working in concert with 128 MB of RAM and 128 MB of Flash, these modest tech specs are more than enough to play 1993's Doom at a reasonable framerate.

Actually getting the shooter onto the device also proves far from a challenge. Christophel easily extracts the device's firmware from its SoC, making it relatively straightforward to reverse engineer into a port of Doom.

Input is a little rough and ready, with touch controls mapped to labels lining the edges of the screen. The game itself runs slap-bang in the middle of all of this, taking up a small part of what wasn't an especially spacious LCD touch screen to begin with.

Aaron quips, "Yeah, I know how stupid this is—but it had to be done."

And, as my rice cooker quivers next to my spice rack, I'm inclined to agree with him.

You can check out Christophel's other projects—including this nifty Doom-running epaper device—on his German-language blog and English-language YouTube channel. If you're hungry for more Doom-where-it-shouldn't-be projects, you might want to check out the shooter running via a charging station, technically on a $30 vape, a bored high schooler's PDF, and—perhaps most interestingly—recursively within itself.