Doom has been ported to an earbud

Technical aspects of the earbud Doom port

• Runs Doom on PineBuds Pro and exposes it over the internet so others can remotely play on the author’s own earbuds.
• Video is JPEG-encoded from Doom’s 8‑bit palette framebuffer; reported compression around 4.7–5.8:1 depending on scene complexity.
• There is a standalone viewer that can connect directly to the buds and display the game on mobile, though currently only as an intro loop without touch controls.
• Discussion of using UART vs Bluetooth: UART gives much better throughput than Bluetooth’s ~1 Mbps, leading to the question of running a Doom instance per earbud.
• Author notes multiplayer between left/right earbuds was a “stretch goal”; others joke about splitting screen/eyes for stereo or VR-style Doom.

Reactions to PineBuds Pro as hardware

• Some commenters use PineBuds Pro regularly and like them, but note limited battery life (~2 hours with ANC).
• Others use them as generic Bluetooth buds without ANC and are satisfied.
• One person is wary due to past negative Pine64 hardware experiences.

Overpowered microcontrollers: triumph, failure, or waste?

• One side views this as evidence of “overkill” general-purpose hardware in simple devices, possibly an economic or environmental failure.
• Counterarguments:
  • Economies of scale make powerful general-purpose MCUs cheaper than custom ASICs or FPGAs for most products.
  • ANC, beamforming, codecs, and wireless stacks genuinely need substantial compute and low latency.
  • Extra headroom enables firmware updates, new features, and future-proofing, potentially reducing e‑waste.
  • Material cost per additional transistor on mature nodes is tiny; most cost is design, tooling, and manufacturing process.
• Some emphasize environmental impact from chip fabrication (chemicals, energy, water) and argue that “materials are nothing” understates real costs.

Doom as a cultural and technical benchmark

• Many celebrate the port as part of the long-running “it runs Doom” tradition, sharing links to lists and communities of Doom ports and related projects (dongles, vapes, etc.).
• Doom is seen as the default because it’s open source, iconic, resource-light but non-trivial, and technically interesting.
• A few lament that it’s always Doom and reflect on how older, smaller games (e.g., classic DOS titles) feel tighter and more replayable than many modern, bloated, grindy games.

Humor, meta, and side notes

• Jokes about Doom on disposable vapes, lightbulbs, Kubernetes-on-earbuds, “Doom’s Law,” and sending Doom to aliens.
• Some note that if an earbud can run Doom, it can also run malware.
• Several people praise the project’s web presentation and the idea of letting strangers play on the actual hardware.