Biological Computer with Living Human Brain Cells Successfully Plays Doom Game

https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2026/03/worlds-first-living-neuron-biological-computer.html

https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/Chocolate_Doom?fbclid=IwVERDUAN1SXtleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHkp2gDigE6OvT7x9dmEwjHf_1_8CETrjYdx5zMfcCOa65YtgFoT-XEKJo6GN_aem_hakwDYo7Y5d4N7WWFn17iw

There were lots of interesting topics discussed in the recent Ubuntu Summit, but one in particular might just tickle the fancy of most any techie above 30: the story of how Doom was actually running in space. Programmer Ólafur Waage recounted the tale of when his team took part in the European Space Agency’s hacking challenge and got the seminal game running on a satellite.

The satellite in question was the now-decommissioned OPS-SAT “flying laboratory,” whose sole purpose in life was to be a playground of sorts for improving “mission control and onboard satellite systems.” It measured only 10 x 10 x 30 cm (3.94″ x 3.94″ x 11.81″) and carried an onboard computer the ESA said was “10 times more powerful than any [ESA spacecraft at the time]“.

The project achieved a few “firsts”: the first onboard machine-learning training of a model, the first in-orbit game of chess, and the first stock transaction executed from space. And, apparently, the first to run Doom in orbit.

Despite the relatively powerful computer compared to the 1992-era Intel 486 machines that originally ran Doom, the software environment was still limited. The team couldn’t just upload every software dependency needed to build the game.

Running Doom took two tries, with the first using Chocolate Doom, a source-faithful port that uses SDL as its graphics and sound backend, an OS-agnostic library with very few dependencies. It worked well enough, but it produced no graphical output, as the satellite didn’t have a screen. And as Waage put it, even if it did, you’d need a really good telescope.

Since Waage and his imps wanted some graphical output, they pivoted to doomgeneric, a port of Doom designed to make porting to other systems easier. They then assigned graphical output to a virtual video card and took screenshots of the game. But then, how do you proudly display to the world that this particular Doom was in space? By using the satellite’s camera images of Earth for the game’s outdoor background, of course.

We can only look forward to Doom actually running on Mars, where the game is set.