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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/01/this-pdf-contains-a-playable-copy-of-doom/ [arstechnica.com]

Here at Ars, we're suckers for stories about hackers getting Doom running on everything from CAPTCHA robot checks [arstechnica.com] and Windows' notepad.exe [arstechnica.com] to AI hallucinations [arstechnica.com] and fluorescing gut bacteria [arstechnica.com]. Despite all that experience, we were still thrown for a loop by a recent demonstration of Doom running in the usually static confines of a PDF file [pages.dev].

On the Github page for the quixotic project [github.com], coder ading2210 discusses how Adobe Acrobat included some robust support for JavaScript in the PDF file format.
[...]
the Doom PDF can take inputs via the user typing in a designated text field and generate "video" output in the form of converted ASCII text fed into 200 individual text fields, each representing a horizontal line of the Doom display. The text in those fields is enough to simulate a six-color monochrome display at a "pretty poor but playable" 13 frames per second (about 80 ms per frame).
[...]
have to dock at least a few coolness points because the port doesn't actually work on generic desktop versions of Adobe Acrobat—you need to load it through a Chromium-based web browser. But the project gains those coolness points back with a web front-end [pages.dev] that lets users load generic WAD files [doomwiki.org] into a playable PDF.

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