Show HN: KiDoom – Running DOOM on PCB Traces

178 points by mikeayles 9 hours ago

I got DOOM running in KiCad by rendering it with PCB traces and footprints instead of pixels.

Walls are rendered as PCB_TRACK traces, and entities (enemies, items, player) are actual component footprints - SOT-23 for small items, SOIC-8 for decorations, QFP-64 for enemies and the player.

How I did it:

Started by patching DOOM's source code to extract vector data directly from the engine. Instead of trying to render 64,000 pixels (which would be impossibly slow), I grab the geometry DOOM already calculates internally - the drawsegs[] array for walls and vissprites[] for entities.

Added a field to the vissprite_t structure to capture entity types (MT_SHOTGUY, MT_PLAYER, etc.) during R_ProjectSprite(). This lets me map 150+ entity types to appropriate footprint categories.

The DOOM engine sends this vector data over a Unix socket to a Python plugin running in KiCad. The plugin pre-allocates pools of traces and footprints at startup, then just updates their positions each frame instead of creating/destroying objects. Calls pcbnew.Refresh() to update the display.

Runs at 10-25 FPS depending on hardware. The bottleneck is KiCad's refresh, not DOOM or the data transfer.

Also renders to an SDL window (for actual gameplay) and a Python wireframe window (for debugging), so you get three views running simultaneously.

Follow-up: ScopeDoom

After getting the wireframe renderer working, I wanted to push it somewhere more physical. Oscilloscopes in X-Y mode are vector displays - feed X coordinates to one channel, Y to the other. I didn't have a function generator, so I used my MacBook's headphone jack instead.

The sound card is just a dual-channel DAC at 44.1kHz. Wired 3.5mm jack → 1kΩ resistors → scope CH1 (X) and CH2 (Y). Reused the same vector extraction from KiDoom, but the Python script converts coordinates to ±1V range and streams them as audio samples.

Each wall becomes a wireframe box, the scope traces along each line. With ~7,000 points per frame at 44.1kHz, refresh rate is about 6 Hz - slow enough to be a slideshow, but level geometry is clearly recognizable. A 96kHz audio interface or analog scope would improve it significantly (digital scopes do sample-and-hold instead of continuous beam tracing).

Links:

KiDoom GitHub: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/KiDoom, writeup: https://www.mikeayles.com/#kidoom

ScopeDoom GitHub: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/ScopeDoom, writeup: https://www.mikeayles.com/#scopedoom