Doom holds a special place as one of the biggest games of the 1990s, as well as being one of the foundational blocks of the FPS genre. Long before 3D accelerators hit the market, iD Software’s hit was being played on computers worldwide, and later spread to all manner of other platforms. [David Ruiz] decided to build a cutdown version for everyone’s favourite, the ATmega328.

Due to the limited resources available, it’s not a direct port of Doom. [David] instead took some sprites and map data from the original game, and built a raycasting engine similar to that of Wolfenstein 3D. Despite the limited memory and CPU cycles, the basic game can run at between 8-11 FPS. There are fancy dithering tricks to help improve the sense of depth, a simplified enemy AI, and even a custom text library for generating the UI.

It’s a great example of what can be done with a seemingly underpowered part. We’ve seen similar work before, with Star Fox replicated on the Arduboy. A hacker’s ingenuity truly knows no bounds.

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Just before the days where every high school student had a cell phone, everyone in class had a TI graphing calculator. In some ways this was better than a cell phone: If you wanted to play BlockDude instead of doing trig identities, this was much more discrete. The only downside is that the TI calculators can’t easily communicate to each other like cell phones can. [Christopher] has solved this problem with his latest project which provides Wi-Fi functionality to a TI graphing calculator, and has much greater aspirations than helping teenagers waste time in pre-calculus classes.

The boards are based around a Spark Core Wi-Fi development board which is (appropriately) built around a TI CC3000 chip and a STM32F103 microcontroller. The goal of the project is to connect the calculators directly to the Global CALCnet network without needing a separate computer as a go-between. These boards made it easy to get the original Arduino-based code modified and running on the new hardware.

After a TI-BASIC program is loaded on the graphing calculator, it is able to input the credentials for the LAN and access the internet where all kinds of great calculator resources are available through the Global CALCnet. This is a great project to make the math workhorse of the classroom even more useful to students. Or, if you’re bored with trig identities again, you can also run a port of DOOM.