An MIT researcher has gotten the 30-year-old computer game Doom running on actual gut bacteria. The frame rate is really bad, as the game would take nearly 600 years to beat.

An MIT biotech researcher has been able to run the iconic computer game Doom using actual gut bacteria. Lauren Ramlan didn’t get the game going on a digital simulation of bacteria, but turned actual bacteria into pixels to display the 30-year-old FPS, as reported by Rock Paper Shotgun.

Specifically, Ramlan created a display inside of a cell wall made entirely of E. coli bacteria. The 32x48 1-bit display may not win any resolution awards, but who cares, right? It’s Doom running on bacteria. The researcher dosed the bacteria with fluorescent proteins to get them to light up just like digital pixels.

  • @SanctusEnglish
    35•10 months ago

    The title is misleading and the article even points it out. She is displaying Doom (which is still cool and kinda fucking crazy) on bacteria. It is not being processed by the bacteria.

    • @[email protected]
      18•10 months ago

      The day we can use biocomputers like that is when criminals start hiding URLs in their DNA to rickroll the police chasing them

      • @breakingcups
        4•10 months ago

        Fuck rickrolls, I’d hide the EICAR test string and watch their lab computers lock up whenever they try to process my sample.

  • @[email protected]
    21•10 months ago

    “To be blunt, the frame rate is atrocious, likely due to the fact that bacteria were never intended to display 3D video games. It takes 70 minutes for the bacteria to illuminate one frame of the game and another eight hours to return to its starting state. This translates to nearly nine hours per frame, which means it would take around 600 years to play display the game from start to finish.”

    Made me giggle, anyway.

  • @[email protected]English
    7•10 months ago

    If I arranged a bunch of rocks to show the DOOM logo, would someone say I was running DOOM on stones?

    Nonsense click bait, non-news article. If there’s an actual achievement here, it’s overshadowed by the misinformation.

    • Dirk Darkly
      8•10 months ago

      Did you just equate turning living organisms into a monitor with arranging rocks?

      • @[email protected]English
        2•10 months ago

        Living organisms into a monitor… In the same way that a bunch of people in a stadium can hold up squares that make up an image? I mean at the end of the day almost anything can be made into a “monitor”. That doesn’t mean it’s “running DOOM”.

        • @HandBash
          3•10 months ago

          Yeah it’s more like displaying a picture of the doom intro screen rather than actually computing it. Still cool but vastly different than computing the drawing functionality of the game.