You can technically play Doom on a $30 vape and it just needs 'that last bit of RAM' to run natively
Turns out, for just $30, you can get a sage green vape with a built-in 1100 mAh battery, USB Type-C charging, and a 1.47-inch TFT touchscreen. Throw away the E-Liquid, though, we won't be needing it to slay imps, demons, and lost souls.
Hacker and creator Aaron Christophel recently took to their YouTube channel to show Doom on a Pixo Aspire, which is "a way overpowered vape, for whatever reason" (via VideoCardz). It has a 32-bit Arm Cortex M4 processor, 384 kB of flash memory and up to 64 kB of SRAM.
Christophel notes that it would need "that last bit of RAM" to run Doom natively, so this version is effectively sending game output to a bit of software, which flips the screen to run on the vape. In other words, a PC runs Doom but displays it on the vape's touchscreen via a USB Type-C cable.
Christophel says you can "use it as a second monitor", which makes sense, should you have to show a mouse or some sort of small pet a duplicate of your screen. Hey, it's nice to have the option. If you have such a mouse, you can grab custom firmware via GitHub, run it on the vape, then mirror your screen.
Impressively, this little vape has a Bluetooth LE chip and a microphone, too. I'm not too sure what kind of vape would need a microphone, or a wireless connection, but it seems likely this chip just happens to have that hardware, and it would be significantly more effort to remove it.
This does make me wonder the lengths that hackers could go with future technology, if we have something this futuristic in something as simple as a vape. For context, the Sinclair ZX80, which launched back in 1980, had just 1 kB of Memory (with a max of 16 kB). We even saw the Bendix G-15, which launched way back in 1956, running Doom just a few months ago (and it cost a mere $49,500 at launch).
This is the second story in the last week showing off how impressive the tech shoved into vapes really is. An entire website is being hosted on one right now, which is mighty impressive despite traffic consistently taking it down.
Given that this Doom vape hack is done via screen sharing, you can technically get anything you want on there, from a live feed of the news to animated gifs of Hatsune Miku. In my hands, it would be used for the movie club viewing of Tenet. Just as Christopher Nolan would want.