The Shores of Bell: Play Doom on Nintendo’s $99 Alarm Clock

Earlier this week, a creative Twitter user named GaryOderNichts managed to hack Nintendo’s Alarmo alarm clock to run the shareware version of Doom. The impressive feat was showcased in a video Gary uploaded, sparking excitement and curiosity among gaming enthusiasts.

In the Twitter thread, Gary explained a couple of technical details: there’s no audio support yet, and to bypass the USB loader’s memory limitations, the Doom shareware .wad file must be compressed and then decompressed upon booting. Interestingly, if you’re interested in trying this hack out, there’s no need to modify your Alarmo. All the project files you might need are conveniently available on GitHub.

So, how did Gary pull this off? He breaks it all down in a thorough blog post. The first step was to investigate the Alarmo’s inner hardware, which for the tech-savvy among us isn’t entirely surprising—it uses an STM32H730ZBI6 Arm Cortex-M7 processor, a well-documented component. This provided Gary the foundation to integrate his Nintendo Alarmo with a Raspberry Pi.

In a tweet that followed his detailed blog, Gary humorously acknowledged the popular demand to see Doom running on the Alarmo, delivering what fans wanted with a captivating short video clip.

What required some soldering and modding at the beginning has turned into a rather straightforward process that’s now available on GitHub. There’s no need for a heavily modified Alarmo to start up Doom using a USB.

The gameplay controls for Doom on the Alarmo are pretty innovative, with the top controls adapting to the game. The buttons and a touch-sensitive dial let you aim and shoot, utilizing a swiping motion for left-to-right aiming and a notification button for firing, as featured in the video showing off the game’s early levels.

While a $99 alarm clock running such a classic game might sound unique, the inventive Doom community has seen the game run on all sorts of unexpected machines—everything from a smart lawnmower to the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 microcontroller has hosted Doom. There’s even a story about someone enabling an old Commodore 64 to run Doom with a special expansion card.

So, if you’re up for some tinkering, you too can bring Doom to life on your Nintendo Alarmo, adding it to the list of quirky devices that this legendary game can now call home.