Enjoying DOOM on an Aspire PIXO Rechargeable Vape Equipment is Potential, Simply Not Advisable

A vape that runs DOOM? Seems like a fever dream from a tech fanatic’s late night time Reddit scroll, however Aaron Christophel made it actual with the PIXO Aspire, a $35 vaping equipment that’s greater than only a nicotine supply system. This tiny system, with its 323×173 pixel touchscreen and Puya PY32F403XC microcontroller primarily based on a Cortex-M4 core, can virtually run DOOM natively.

Vapes are purported to warmth liquid, produce vapor and perhaps show a couple of settings on a display screen. However the PIXO Aspire exceeds expectations. The Puya microcontroller has sufficient oomph to do advanced duties. With 16 MB of exterior SPI Flash storage and a touchscreen show, the {hardware} screams potential past its supposed use. There’s additionally a vibration motor for haptic suggestions and an unused Bluetooth Low-Vitality chip, so the maker by no means activated some options.

Working DOOM natively would have been very best however one impediment stood in the best way: the Puya chip’s tiny 64 kB of SRAM. DOOM, regardless of its lean design for 1993 PCs, wants extra RAM to deal with graphics, sport logic and sound in actual time. The processor and storage had been sufficient however the SRAM bottleneck prevented a local port. Christophel wasn’t deterred, he got here up with an ingenious answer: flip the vape into a bit of secondary show for a PC working DOOM.

Christophel needed to write new firmware which is out there on his GitHub website to show the PIXO Aspire right into a screensharing system. He used the vape’s USB port to hook up with a PC and broadcast DOOM’s pictures on the 323×173 pixel touchscreen. A PC companion device rapidly grabs the sport’s output, compresses it and sends it to the vape. What’s the outcome? You management DOOM with a mouse and keyboard in your laptop and the motion occurs on the vape’s display screen.

The PIXO Aspire’s firmware is a fortress, with an inside watchdog timer and an exterior {hardware} timer that can reboot the system if one thing goes fallacious. These security options designed to make sure secure vaping had been a significant impediment. Christophel spent hours reverse engineering the system to determine how the timers labored and easy methods to stop them from resetting his customized firmware. He succeeded and the vape is steady and DOOM is working.

What’s subsequent in vape gaming? The PIXO Aspire’s unused Bluetooth chip may theoretically be used for wi-fi streaming and even multiplayer hacks. Future vapes may need extra SRAM and native DOOM ports with out the necessity for a PC. Producers may market gaming vapes to a small, however vocal viewers.
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