Now Even Your Christmas Tree Can Run Doom

If you’re not into decking the halls with shimmering baubles or cutesy Hallmark Keepsake ornaments, Jeroen Domburg has created a fantastically nerdy various: a tiny retro desktop PC ornament full with a working screen that really performs Doom.

We’ve stumbled throughout a handful of vacation adorning hacks like these over time, together with a miniature Nintendo Switch with a display screen that performs gameplay GIFs from titles like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and a tiny retro TV filled with a playlist of basic ‘90s holiday commercials. While once popcorn on a long string was considered to be all a Christmas tree needed to look festive, our demand for elaborate holiday adornments has taken over, and Domburg is now raising the bar even higher.

His tiny desktop PC, which looks modeled after the aggressively beige IBM workstations of the ‘80s (despite Doom not arriving until late 1993), was creating using a 3D printer. The models Domburg used are available through GitHub for anyone who wants to make their own. Instead of a classic Intel processor, the ornament runs on an ESP32, and while Doom has already been ported to it before, Domburg instead opted for a version of the first-person shooter that had been ported to the Game Boy Advance (and not the official Doom GBA release), because it facilitated controller connectivity.

So while the ornament can run autonomously, simply playing through Doom’s demo mode, the tiny PC may also be related to a Bluetooth controller for anybody who needs the eye-melting problem of searching down baddies simply millimeters in top. In its current form, it solely provides single participant gameplay, however we’d like to see a model two that provides multiplayer as nicely. An whole tree coated in tiny Doom enjoying PCs all networked collectively is nearly as excellent a Christmas morning as we will think about.