Developer Sam Chiet has shared a video that demonstrates how DOOM can run in Notepad, and at 60 FPS, no less. As shown in the footage, the program’s text is used to recreate the visuals of the game, none of which is sped up, according to Chiet, who clarified that it’s fully playable with “zero fakery,” with no modifications made to the code of notepad.exe at all. Chiet said he’ll be releasing it soon.
From an Escapist report:
Today, YouTuber Samperson (Sam Chiet) demonstrated that he has Doom running in Notepad at 60 frames per second. Yes, this is Notepad the basic text editor program that comes preinstalled in every Windows computer, but it’s using its text to recreate the visuals of Doom.
If you’re looking for a technical explanation of how Samperson got this running, I’m really not the guy for the job. But it appears Notepad is simply being used as the equivalent of a TV screen, while other software is doing all the real work of running the game and translating its visuals into a comprehensible text visualization for Notepad to display.
DOOM has been made to run on all sorts of hardware and software in recent times, including refrigerators, calculators, and even pregnancy tests. DOOM can even run inside of DOOM, as demonstrated by a video shared this summer by someone who found an exploit in the original DOS version of DOOM 2.