"There's a certain delight to be had in doing something just to see if you can. Case in point: rendering Doom using PCB design software, or wading through the shores of Hell via the medium of an oscilloscope. Enter Mike Ayles, who pondered if it was possible to render Doom in vectors using KiCad. The answer? Of course it was. Doom can run on pretty much anything."
"KiCad deals with PCB layout. Hence, each frame of the game is rendered as copper traces, with PCB components replacing game objects. The walls are PCB traces, Ayles said: "Demons are intimidating 64-pin packages. Ammo clips are humble 3-pin parts." "And every frame creates a legitimate PCB design that could theoretically be fabricated." We at El Reg are big fans of such gloriously absurd and ultimately pointless bits of technology, particularly one that"
Mike Ayles rendered Doom frames as vector graphics inside KiCad by using the PCB editor as a renderer while running the game engine as a separate C process. Each frame is represented as PCB copper traces with components standing in for game objects: walls become traces, demons map to 64-pin packages, and ammo clips to 3-pin parts. Every frame produces a legitimate PCB design that could be fabricated. The setup achieved about 25 fps on an M1 MacBook Pro after KiCad tweaks. The project was created in two days and used Claude for most code, with manual architectural corrections.
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