Olafur Waage, a senior software developer from Iceland who now resides in Norway, has achieved a remarkable milestone by successfully running the iconic 1993 video game Doom on the European Space Agency’s OPS-SAT satellite. This accomplishment is significant not only for its novelty but also for demonstrating the potential of advanced computing capabilities in space. The OPS-SAT satellite, a ‘flying laboratory’ designed for testing innovative onboard computing technologies, was equipped with an experimental computer ten times more powerful than the average spacecraft. Waage, who is known for his humorous YouTube content, explained that the objective was to break the traditional risk-averse approach to space missions by utilizing cutting-edge computing technologies.
The process of porting Doom to the satellite involved overcoming several technical challenges. The satellite’s onboard ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 processor, while advanced for space hardware, was relatively slow compared to Earth-bound systems. To address this, Waage selected Chocolate Doom 2.3, an open-source version of the game, for its compatibility with the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS distro already running on OPS-SAT. Additionally, the decision to use this version was driven by the availability of necessary libraries for Ubuntu 18.04. The team also faced the challenge of updating software in orbit, which is both complex and time-consuming.
Wag’s team managed to run Doom flawlessly on the satellite, with the only indication of the game’s operation being a lone log entry initially. To visualize the game’s environment, the team used the satellite’s camera to capture real-time images of Earth and integrated these into the game’s skybox. This required extensive tweaking to adapt the satellite’s photographs to the game’s 256-color palette. Despite the challenges, the final result was a visually appealing representation of Earth within the game, demonstrating the team’s ingenuity and technical skill.