Programmer Gets Doom Running On a Space Satellite (zdnet.com) 28
An Icelandic programmer successfully ran Doom on the European Space Agency's OPS-SAT satellite, proving that the iconic 1993 shooter can now run not just everywhere on Earth -- but in orbit. ZDNet reports: Olafur Waage, a senior software developer from Iceland who now works in Norway, explained at Ubuntu Summit 25.10 how he, a self-described "professional keyboard typist" and maker of funny videos, ended up making what is perhaps the game's most outlandish port yet: Doom running on a real satellite in orbit, the European Space Agency (ESA) OPS-SAT satellite. OPS-SAT, a "flying laboratory" for testing novel onboard computing techniques, was equipped with an experimental computer approximately 10 times more powerful than the norm for spacecraft. Waag explained, "OPS-SAT was the first of its kind, devoted to demonstrating drastically improved mission control capabilities when satellites can fly more powerful onboard computers. The point was to break the curse of being too risk-averse with multi-million-dollar spacecraft." (The satellite was decommissioned in 2024.) [...]
Running Doom in orbit was partly a challenge of portability and partly a challenge of the limitations of space hardware and mission control. The on-board ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 processor, while hot stuff for space computing hardware (which tends to be low-powered and radiation-hardened), was slow even by Earth-bound standards. Waage chose Chocolate Doom 2.3, a popular open-source version of Doom, for its compatibility with the Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support (LTS) distro, which was already running on OPS-SAT. Besides, Waage noted, "We picked Chocolate Doom 2.3 because of the libraries available for 18.04 -- that was the last one that would actually build.
Updating software in orbit is extremely difficult, so relatively little code would have to be uploaded. As Waage said, "Doom is relatively straightforward C with a few external dependencies." In other words, it's easy to port. [...] The only sign that Doom was running in space at first was a lone log entry. So, the team used the satellite's camera to snap real-time images of the Earth, then swapped Doom's Mars skybox for actual satellite photos. "The idea was to take a screenshot from the satellite and use that as the sky, all rendered in software using the game's restricted 256-color palette," explained Waage. Even this posed unexpected difficulties: "Trying to draw all of these beautiful colors with those colors," said Waage, "it's probably not going to work right off. But we tried gradient tests, NASA demo photos. It took quite a bit of tweaking." Eventually, instead of a fantasy Mars as the sky background, they got a good-looking, real Earth in the game's sky. The game itself ran flawlessly. After all, Waage said, "It ran beautifully. It's on Ubuntu."
Running Doom in orbit was partly a challenge of portability and partly a challenge of the limitations of space hardware and mission control. The on-board ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 processor, while hot stuff for space computing hardware (which tends to be low-powered and radiation-hardened), was slow even by Earth-bound standards. Waage chose Chocolate Doom 2.3, a popular open-source version of Doom, for its compatibility with the Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support (LTS) distro, which was already running on OPS-SAT. Besides, Waage noted, "We picked Chocolate Doom 2.3 because of the libraries available for 18.04 -- that was the last one that would actually build.
Updating software in orbit is extremely difficult, so relatively little code would have to be uploaded. As Waage said, "Doom is relatively straightforward C with a few external dependencies." In other words, it's easy to port. [...] The only sign that Doom was running in space at first was a lone log entry. So, the team used the satellite's camera to snap real-time images of the Earth, then swapped Doom's Mars skybox for actual satellite photos. "The idea was to take a screenshot from the satellite and use that as the sky, all rendered in software using the game's restricted 256-color palette," explained Waage. Even this posed unexpected difficulties: "Trying to draw all of these beautiful colors with those colors," said Waage, "it's probably not going to work right off. But we tried gradient tests, NASA demo photos. It took quite a bit of tweaking." Eventually, instead of a fantasy Mars as the sky background, they got a good-looking, real Earth in the game's sky. The game itself ran flawlessly. After all, Waage said, "It ran beautifully. It's on Ubuntu."
The year is 2048 (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
ping (Score:2)
ping time must be crazy
Ping vs. Pong (Score:2)
ping time must be crazy
Meh, what’s 500ms one way between friends.
(Talk about incorporating a handicap in gaming. Satellite Pros vs. Fiber Joes sounds like a match I’d wait around for.)
Re: Ping vs. Pong (Score:3)
I played many games of Quake with a 500ms+ ping back in the day.
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I was playing on a 53K USR Courier at 185 ping and that was a bit laggy when compared to the LAN at college (even if it was 4xT1s for 25K students). I really want to know how the hell you were able to do anything useful at 500+ms.
Re: (Score:2)
That's nothing (Score:2)
Now get Skyrim running on it!
Lexically correct (Score:3)
Next goalpost (Score:3)
Getting it to run on Mars. If one of those Mars rovers stop driving... let it run Doom.
Crazy that they didn't even include a screenshot. (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a presentation from Ólafur. [youtube.com]
Re:Crazy that they didn't even include a screensho (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO, the most interesting thing they did was with the palette. They were obsessed with getting not just images snapped by the satellite as the sky, but having them actually look good, and even a "smart" mapping algorithm to the in-game palette wasn't good enough for them. So they wrote an algo to simultaneously choose a palette for both the colours in the satellite image and the colours in the game's graphical assets so it would pick colours best for both of them, and then remapped both the satellite image and the game's assets to this new palette. Also, normally satellite images are denoised on the ground, but a partner had gotten a machine learning denoising algo running on the satellite.
One thing they weren't able to deal with was that the game tiles the sky background, which is fine because it's a tileable image, but obviously random pictures of Earth aren't (except the nighttime images, which are all black!). If they had had more time, I imagine they would have set up something like heal selection to merge the edges, but one of the problems was that in order to take images of Earth, the satellite had to be oriented in a way that increased its drag and accelerated its deentry... so ironically, playing DOOM was accelerating the satellite's doom.
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i just started seeing Shorts from this guy about funny Norwegian things. Had no idea he's a programmer
Doom - Kessler Edition. (Score:2)
Waag explained, "OPS-SAT was the first of its kind, devoted to demonstrating drastically improved mission control capabilities when satellites can fly more powerful onboard computers. The point was to break the curse of being too risk-averse with multi-million-dollar spacecraft."
Uh, hate to point out the obvious, but he did nothing but prove the point as to why we purposely keep satellite computers K.I.S.S. simple; one hackers video game port is another hackers infection point.
Wonder what kind of “experimental” malware (twisted irony will call it “Kessler”) will try and target this target-rich environment after pulling that stunt and then advertising to the world. Think that thing is hacker-proof now? Think an hacking planet assumes that anymore?
+30 point
Re:Doom - Kessler Edition. (Score:5, Informative)
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This guy had legal access. He didn't hack the satellite. It's also decommissioned, but that doesn't mean it's open prey ignored by the folks who own it.
Nothing ever is when it gets hacked. And everything you just said made that powerful experimental environment even worse.
Everything in orbit gets a high level of scrutiny and security.
Dare you to tell me who actually scrutinized this stunt. Considering the security implications they just declassified to an entire fucking planet. What, you think that organization who owns it is going to develop NSA-grade investigative power to heavily scrutinize every new consultant and hire over the next few years to ensure they don’t hire a spy with legal access to control a
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You're out of your element donnie.
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Dare you to tell me who actually scrutinized this stunt.
The very first line of the summary says he was helped by the ESA. The last line of the second paragraph spells it out for you: The European Space Agency. You know, the guys who own the satellite. Real, actual rocket scientists, Mr Armchair Expert.
Bonus, another group of non-hackers who do real space science did it too:
Since then, the Polish company KP Labs has also successfully run Doom on its Intuition-1 satellite. This used the company's Leopard Data Processing Unit to run Doom while simultaneously capturing hyperspectral images of Earth.
I'd trust them to have a good handle on security for their multi million dollar hardware.
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I think satellites run old hardware because it needs to be proven, radiation hardened, and low power. They made a bunch of aerospace PowerPC chips a long time ago and have been selling that lot for most of my life, possibly even up to today. That's the one satcom chip i kinda sorta know about but it's always been more than powerful enough to run doom so i dunno why they're acting like getting doom running on a dual cortex A9 is some technically difficult process.
Doom was developed on whatever m68k cpu is
ZDNet knows nothing about tech (Score:5, Informative)
"The on-board ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 processor, while hot stuff for space computing hardware (which tends to be low-powered and radiation-hardened), was slow even by Earth-bound standards."
DOOM could run on a 40 MIPS 486. A single core A9 can manage almost 4000 MIPS! So no, whatever other issues there may have been getting Doom to run on the hardware, it sure as hell wasn't CPU speed.
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Yep this whole article is just ubuntu marketing. Doom has no doubt been run many times in space by now, a cortex a9 is mega overkill.
Now run Space Invaders on nukes monitoring sats... (Score:2)
Now run Space Invaders on one of the satellites that are monitoring nuclear weapons...
Ya, but ... (Score:2)
Can you run NetBSD on the satellite?
(I'm guessing probably - after all, it can run on a Cylon [laughingsquid.com]. :-) )
Martian Moons eXploration (Score:2)
That's going to be interesting (Score:2)
When 3I Atlas stops and scans easily-accessible data from our rudimentary systems, I'm not sure whether this will scare them away, or cause them to flag us for ASAP removal by the Galactic Authorities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]