GamesFPSDoomPower-crazed boffin gets Doom running through the medium of gut bacteriaWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesFPSDoomPower-crazed boffin gets Doom running through the medium of gut bacteriaWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: id Software)
Doom has had one of the most remarkable afterlives of any game, from the still-thriving modding and speedrunning scenes to the meme-slash-mission of getting this thing running on any and all technology available to humanity. You’ve seenthe pregnancy tests,the Lego brick,the potatoes, the engineers whogot it going on a 1-milliwatt chipwhile sombrely telling us all what serious business this is. Now, it’s time for some cell shading.
Lauren Ramlam is a biology PhD student at MIT, and for the final project of the synthetic biology course had one big idea: let’s get Doom displaying via gut bacteria.Ramlam’s written reportbriefly outlines the history of Doom running via various things, before coming to the inescapable question of whether “biological systems might be engineered to host this classic millennial FPS.”
The theory is relatively understandable: visually compress Doom’s frames, then replicate which pixels are ‘on’ and ‘off’ to approximate those frames via flourescing bacteria. The only bottleneck Ramlam’s project has is a fairly major one, however. The bacteria do this relatively slowly and, after generating each ‘frame’, there is significant lag time before the cells return to their starting state and are ready to display the next frame.
So Ramlam has this display working but, if you wanted to actually play Doom on it, you’ll need roughly 600 years:
“In conclusion, it takes approximately 70 minutes to reach the peak display output of GFP [the fluorescent protein] in an on well, and a total of 8 hours and 20 minutes for the cell to return approximately to the starting state,” says Ramlam. “The framerate for the original Doom is capped at 35 frames/second, and the average playthrough time is ~5 hours. Doing the math, this means that it would take 599 years to run Doom on cells, according to this simulation.”
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