Graham Sanderson Brings Doom to the Raspberry Pi RP2350 — and the DEF CON 32 Badge
Gaming-themed badge can now play a mean Doom, though good luck finishing on the hardest difficulty with no strafe support.
Raspberry Pi engineer Graham Sanderson is once again bringing a little Doom to the company's microcontrollers, releasing a port of Chocolate Doom for the RP2350 — suitable for use on the badges handed to attendees at DEF CON 32 over the weekend.
"This is a version of my 'rp2040-doom' (which itself now supports RP2350) modified to run on the DEF CON 32 Badge," Sanderson explains of the new release. "Thanks to Dmitry [Grinberg] for some LCD code that I borrowed! Note that the badge speaker seems to distort really easily, so I have the sound turned way down for now, this is probably good anyway so you don't annoy people around you, but the volume control in the menus does work."
This isn't the first time Sanderson has ported Chocolate Doom to a Raspberry Pi microcontroller: back in March 2022 he released a version for the dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ RP2040, on which the new version is based — having to work around having a mere 264kB of RAM and 2MB of flash storage, while boosting performance to playable levels by overclocking the chip to 270MHz.
In addition to adding RP2350 support to his original Chocolate Doom port, which is an open source re-implementation of Id Software's classic Doom game engine, Sanderson's latest release includes compatibility with the DEF CON 32 badge.
Handed to attendees of the conference held this weekend just gone, the DEF CON 32 badge was one of the first third-party devices to launch with the new RP2350 chip at its heart — though a disagreement between the event's organizers, hardware design firm Entropic Engineering, and firmware engineer Grinberg which led to the latter being physically escorted off-stage ahead of a planned talk on the badge, has taken some of the shine off the project.
The RP2040- and RP2350-compatible Chocolate Doom port is available on GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 2; specific instructions are provided, along with a precompiled firmware, for installing it on the DEF CON 32 badge.
Main article image courtesy of "stacksmashing."