Gaming Keyboards Are Cool But Check Out Doom Running On A Keycap

Seminal first-person shooter Doom has been ported to an ungodly number of platforms and devices over the years, some of which have been highly unusual. Today we noticed another amazing feat of Doom-ifying an unsuspecting device, with a YouTuber demonstrating a fully playable game of Doom running on a keyboard keycap. It didn't need to be connected to the PC for the game to work, and it even plays sound…


Gaming keyboards are good for gaming, right? But they usually need a PC hooked up to play said games. Some smart lateral thinking by TheKeebProject (as embedded above) gets by this restriction. There is a custom PCB featuring a Raspberry Pi 2040 microprocessor inside the 'Keeb' in question.

For the all-important display in the keycap a 320 x 240 pixels panel is used. This effectively matches the original release's 320 x 200 resolution where those pixels were stretched vertically by 20%. A clear resin keycap was printed to fit the screen, and it looks to be about the same size as the enter key on this Doom-ified keyboard.

The version of the game that is run on this keycap is a "modified version of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Doom port." Apparently, this is the full game, not just a demo or single level jaunt.

In summary TheKeebProject produced a keyboard that can play Doom, without a monitor, without a PC, and fully self-contained. We can't say how playable 'Keycap Doom' is, with a tiny screen like this, but at least the keyboard is normal size.

If you are interested in following in TheKeebProject's footsteps, you should be happy to hear that Bob, who runs the channel, has made the RP2040 Doom source code available on GitHub as open source.

Over the years we have seen some crazy feats of 'Doom installed on X.' Some of our favorite recent crazy ports include:

• Doom on a Milky Way Candy Bar
• Doom on a Mc emulation on the Wii
• Doom running in Notepad
• A Lego brick that featured an OLED display and someone played Doom

Let us know in the comments if we missed any of your favorite crazy Doom ported devices. Where will we see this classic running next?