Doom launched on Anker Prime Charger: 2.26" display and 150 MHz CPU helped

Another day — and another story about running Doom on a device that was not intended for this purpose. This time, however, the result was particularly successful: the classic game works “better than expected,” as enthusiast Aaron Christofel noted. The most interesting thing is that the new Doom media is not a portable gadget, but an Anker desktop charger.

We are talking about the Anker Prime Charger model (price about $200). This is the company’s top-of-the-line solution for desktop use with, one might say, excessive features. Some of them do not affect the game launch in any way: Doom doesn’t need 250 watts of Power Delivery power, six USB ports, or proprietary GaNPrime technology.

For gaming, the display and processor have become much more important. The Anker Prime Charger has a 2.26-inch color screen with a resolution of 480×200 pixels, as well as a Synwit SWM34S SoC with an Arm Cortex-M33 (150 MHz) core, 8 MB of SDRAM and 16 MB of permanent memory. This was enough to run the game in 1993, when home PCs typically ran on single-core CPUs with a frequency of about 25-33 MHz. Christophe lowered the game’s resolution to achieve the performance level shown.

The most surprising thing is that Anker Doom turned out to be not just an experiment, but quite playable. Controls are provided by a single rotary button to the right of the display. You can move forward or backward by rotating it, and a combination of rotation and pressing it changes directions to the left and right. A simple press of the button is responsible for shooting and opening doors. There is no audio in the game. The only “soundtrack” is the clicks and scrolling of the button itself, which go in time with the retro carnage on the screen.

Christofel emphasized that this Doom port works “completely without hardware modifications”. He used only a debugging connector to load the program code, so you can see a few extra wires on the back.

This project is another example of how Doom has been adapted for the most unexpected devices. Similar experiments already include launching the game on a video card alone, alarm clock, pregnancy test, masturbator and even with the help of intestinal bacteria.

Source: tomshardware