The Shores of Bell: Play Doom on Nintendo’s $99 Alarm Clock

Earlier this week, a Twitter user named GaryOderNichts amazed the online community by hacking Nintendo’s Alarmo alarm clock to run the shareware version of Doom. He shared a video showcasing his achievement in a Twitter thread, captivating tech enthusiasts everywhere.

In his posts, Gary revealed that while there’s no audio support yet, the installation process involves some clever maneuvering to get around memory limitations. You have to compress the Doom shareware .wad file, load it via USB, and then decompress it on boot. But here’s the cool part: you don’t have to tinker with or modify your Alarmo to give this a try yourself. All necessary project files are conveniently available on GitHub.

Curious about how Gary pulled this off? His journey began with cracking open an Alarmo to examine its internal components. Interestingly, the device uses an STM32H730ZBI6 Arm Cortex-M7 processor, which is a well-documented piece of hardware. This knowledge allowed Gary to successfully hack his Alarmo and hook it up to his Raspberry Pi.

Gary went to some lengths, including soldering and tweaking, to get Doom running on the Alarmo. Thankfully, the GitHub version of the project simplifies things considerably. Now, anyone with an Alarmo can launch Doom through USB without diving into hardware modifications.

The controls for Doom on the Nintendo Alarmo make imaginative use of the clock’s interface. The buttons and touch dial up top facilitate movement and shooting in the game. For instance, you can swipe to look around and press the notification button when you need to shoot. While some controls weren’t covered in Gary’s initial demonstration, what was shown provides a fascinating glimpse into the creative gameplay possible on an alarm clock.

The notion of playing Doom on a $99 Nintendo Alarmo might seem quite outlandish, yet it’s certainly not the first unusual gadget that’s seen a Doom port. History has given us Doom on a smart lawnmower, the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 microcontroller, and even an air hockey table. Remarkably, someone also managed to craft an expansion card that enabled a vintage Commodore 64 to run Doom.

It seems wherever there’s technology, there’s potential for Doom. And if you’re curious about the wild world of unconventional devices running this classic game, diving into these projects can be as thrilling as playing the game itself.