Doom on a dongle: Turns out the Apple Lightning to HDMI adapter has more than enough grunt to blast imps with aplomb

HDMI BFGs. And other assorted letters.

If there’s one universal rule we can all agree on, it’s that some enterprising creator will force Doom to run on almost anything. We’ve covered many successful attempts over the years, but even I was surprised to see PC gaming’s arguably greatest shooter running on an Apple Lightning to HDMI adapter.

Yep, just the adapter. After Panic Blog spotted the Apple dongle appeared to be performing some upscaling trickery to stream 1080p content, a hacksaw attempt later revealed some surprisingly beefy hardware inside—at least for a relatively unassuming-looking device.

The adapter uses a Samsung 400 MHz Arm SoC with 256 MB of RAM and its own internal storage to perform video compression and upscaling duties, meaning that there’s a tiny computer hiding inside the chassis.

Rather than simply scoffing at the audacity of such a relatively powerful SoC hiding inside a cable adapter, YouTuber Nyan Satan made an in-hindsight-obvious connection (via Hackaday). That’s more than enough power to run Doom—and so run Doom it shall.

Nyan (or should that be, Mr Satan?) used an existing Checkm8 bootROM exploit to enable custom code on the device, allowing Doom to run in all its crunchy glory.

The demonstration video doesn’t appear to show input commands, but as Hackaday points out, given that it connects via USB 2.0 it should be possible to send keyboard inputs to the game without major issue.

Doom on a dongle indeed. This most recent adaption of id-Software’s classic joins the ranks of other hardware-defying attempts to run Doom on almost anything, including on a satellite, on a pregnancy test, through the medium of gut bacteria, and even on a Lego brick.

Still, who said Apple products were bad at gaming? Not I, at least, nor our James—who’s been performing some experiments of his own playing some of the best PC games of all time on a Macbook.

Doom on an Apple display adapter though? Well, none of us thought of that.