When Doom Invades Your Power Bank: A Sarcastic Tech Rant

Hello everyone. It’s time once again to talk about humanity’s relentless obsession with making Doom run on every single object in existence. At this point, it’s no longer about technology – it’s a cult. We don’t care about social justice, climate change, or the impending AI apocalypse. No, the world’s true priority is ensuring that a 30-year-old demon-blasting shooter can be played on absolutely anything that dares to have a microchip. This time, we have hit a new low – or perhaps a new high, depending on your philosophy of absurdity: Doom, running on an Anker Prime Charger power bank. Because clearly, charging your phone while ripping and tearing demons are two activities that belong together.

Doom on a Power Bank: Because Why Not

Let’s be clear. Nobody asked for this. Nobody was sitting there, weeping at night, thinking, “If only my portable charger could double as a 90s FPS console.” Yet here we are. Aaron Christophel, a hardware tinkerer determined to make the rest of the industry look like lazy buffoons, has managed to get Doom running on a 250W Anker Prime Charger. Yes, the same device you use to juice up your phone now pulls double duty as a murder-box for pixelated demons. It has a 2.26-inch color screen, because apparently we’re going to pretend that’s an acceptable way to play video games in 2024.

The brilliance – or lunacy, depending on your diagnosis – is that the charger wasn’t hacked apart with wires sticking out like some Frankenstein device. Nope. No scalpel work required here. Just a little dab of software slipped through its debug port, and hey presto! Doom on demand. You can quite literally charge your laptop and blow up cacodemons at the same time, in case multitasking wasn’t stressful enough already.

The Specs Nobody Cared About… Until Now

The Anker charger, deep down in its silicon intestines, hides an ARM Cortex-M33 processor running at 150 MHz with 8 MB of RAM and a luxurious 16 MB of storage. Let me put that in perspective. Today’s phones ship with a buffet of octa-core CPUs and RAM you could bathe in. Yet this dinky little chip – the sort of thing you would expect to be running the firmware for your microwave – now performs strong enough to rerun one of the most iconic shooters in gaming history.

The Controls: Torture Masquerading as Input

Of course, playing Doom is not just about running the software. It’s about controls, finesse, and the art of shooting imps in satisfying bursts. Which brings us to the most hilariously sadistic part: the control scheme. The power bank has one lonely spinning wheel by the screen. That’s it. One wheel. But necessity is the mother of comedy, isn’t it? Christophel designed the gameplay around this prison of an input device. Spin the wheel to move forward or backward, click and spin to sorta-kinda strafe, and of course, clicking like an over-caffeinated lab rat to shoot and open doors. Sounds ergonomic, doesn’t it? About as ergonomic as playing Elden Ring with a guitar controller.

It’s an achievement in the same sense that walking across a desert barefoot is technically an achievement. Yes, it’s impressive, but should you really be doing it?

No Hacks, No Scalpels, Just Madness

I’ll give credit where it’s due – no hardware bloodletting here. The charger remains a charger. Somehow, running Doom didn’t transform it into a non-functional paperweight. You can still plug in your iPad, siphon electrons straight into it, and at the same time, turn a wheel like a lunatic to chainsaw a demon. This is the sort of multitasking humanity never requested, but much like a doctor’s bill, you get it whether you like it or not.

The Doom Benchmark Legacy

Let’s not kid ourselves. Doom is no longer just a game. Doom is the biomedical test strip of our tech culture. Got a device? Doesn’t matter if it’s a fridge, calculator, printer, thermostat, or apparently now, a bloody power bank – the first question nerds ask is: “But can it run Doom?” Forget medical throughput benchmarks. Forget system reliability. Forget energy efficiency. If the machine in question isn’t painting the walls of Phobos with demon gore, it may as well be obsolete.

• We’ve seen Doom on calculators.
• Doom on refrigerators.
• Doom on cameras, watches, ATMs, even pregnancy tests.
• And now a power bank, because clearly charging and demon-slaying are natural partners.

At this point, Doom is less of a game and more of a tech rite of passage – the Masonic handshake of the hardware world. If your gadget can’t run Doom, get out. You’re not welcome at this secret lodge.

Conspiracy Mode Engaged

Here’s a thought. What if this isn’t just a quirky hobby? What if hardware companies are deliberately making sure their debug ports and hidden chips are just barely powerful enough to run Doom? Stay with me. It’s the ultimate Easter egg, the secret handshake in silicon design. Don’t be surprised if one day, your toaster Developer Mode boots straight into E1M1. Maybe Bill Gates is somewhere, chuckling. Or maybe John Romero is laughing from the shadows, pulling the strings. A Doom industrial complex, if you will. Wake up, sheeple.

Final Thoughts: Brilliance or Madness?

On the one hand, this is utterly ridiculous. A charger is for charging. Twisting a dial that doubles as the clumsiest joystick in history while squinting at ants fighting on a 2.26-inch screen is madness of the highest order. On the other hand, I can’t deny… it’s genius. It’s stupid genius. Like discovering you can run Crysis on a graphing calculator if you just believe hard enough. It doesn’t make sense. But then again, Doom was never about sense, was it?

So yes. My conclusion: It’s a good stunt. It’s a great flex. It’s the kind of insane project that keeps tech culture alive and well in a world otherwise consumed by TikTok filters and crypto scams. But as a practical way to play Doom? Absolutely horrifying. Please, for the love of sanity, just play it on literally anything else.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.

Article source: Alguien quería jugar a Doom en una batería portátil: además de conseguirlo, lo mejor ha sido lo bien que va