If there is one thing that can be said with certainty in the world of electronics, it is that someone will somehow get Doom running. And in the case of this year's Def Con, a popular hacking conference with a long history, the device in question happened to be a badge issued to all attendees.

Of course, due to the nature of the event, the badge is not just a piece of plastic, but a cross between a Tamagotchi and a Game Boy, complete with a small screen, speakers, and a Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller DefCon's attendee badges are always very popular and designed to be hacked, modified, and reused as much as possible, so it was sort of obligatory to get a badge to get Doom going.

As coder Kilograham emphasizes in the project blog, it was not an easy task. All the code for the port is available on the GitHub page, and thanks to X user stacksmashing (via Tom's Hardware), you can see a brief clip of it in action.

Given that Doom's original code targets an x86 chip running DOS, to port it to a relatively new Arm-based dual-core SoC (system-on-chip) with only 256kB of RAM and 2MB of flash storage, routines and the overall interface would need to undergo significant changes.

This is an impressive feat of programming and certainly a highlight of the Def Con event.

As reported by The Register, Dmitry Grinberg, the firmware developer for the badge, was physically ejected from the event while speaking about the project, and Entropic Engineering, the contract manufacturer, was all official statement about what went wrong in the process.

“We are baffled and extremely disappointed by the institutional decisions made by this year's convention. In addition to the agreed-upon financial compensation (which was only partially provided), we were promised visibility and representation as supporters and contributors to the community,” wrote co-founder and CTO Matthew Pang.

“Team badges (and conference participation), participation in badge talks, announcements, signage, and credit placement on badge cases were all promised in return for the work provided: ...... We are particularly hurt and confused that the conference has chosen to rescind all of the above.”

Grinberg told The Register, “[T]he chip pre-flash deadline has passed.... . each of the 29,770 badges had to be manually programmed by volunteers.” While many of the attendees would have been happy to do this, given that they had paid at least $460 per person to attend the conference, having to manually fix the badges to fully utilize them would have probably also resulted in a few words being uttered in the audience.

It is hoped that eventually all issues with the badges will be resolved and updated firmware will be available on the website. However, if you have a badge and want to play the game with it, Kilograham's Doom port is clearly the connoisseur's choice.