An MIT biotechnology student researcher has found a new way to run 1993’s Doom using E. coli bacteria cells.
Inspired by the popular trend in which people attempt to run Doom on weird hardware such as graphing calculators, ATMs, pregnancy tests, or Legos, PhD student Lauren “Ren” Ramlan has taken the next step by merging the game with a part of the human body.
Originally reported by Rock Paper Shotgun, the process of simulating the game is documented in a YouTube video on Ramlan’s channel. Though the game is not actually running in the traditional sense, she was able to use the walls of cells as a 1-bit display, with illuminated E. coli serving as pixels to recreate simplified frames from the game.
The cell wall creates a 32×48 display, with each E. coli bacteria, which have been engineered to light up using a green fluorescent protein, acting as a single pixel. A frame of Doom is then taken and compressed to match the resolution of the simulated display.
The compressed frame has its pixels sorted into binary “on” and “off” categories, and is matched to the organized bacteria. This sends a signal to the bacteria matched with “on” pixels to induce fluorescence, approximating a frame from the game.
Though the game can be simulated frame by frame, it isn’t quite at the game’s standard rate. The cells take 70 minutes to fully illuminate, and another 8 hours and 20 minutes to return to their base state to be configured into the next frame. That puts the framerate at around three frames per day, a far cry from the original’s 35 frames per second.
Ramlan calculated that an average five hour playthrough of Doom would take around 600 years when played using E. coli, so don’t expect a speedrun of this version anytime soon. Though it may not be the absolute best way to play the game, it’s certainly among the most impressive.