A fitting way to close out 2018 is to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the classic first-person shooter game “Doom.” Doom tells the story of a base operated by the Union Aerospace Corporation on the Martian moon Phobos. The base is overrun by demons from Hell after its top-secret teleportation experiments go awry. A detachment of space marines are sent to investigate and all but one are slaughtered. It’s up to the player to fight through the horde of demons on Phobos and, eventually Hell itself, to prevent a massive invasion of Earth.
Like the last space marine, Doom is a survivor. As Motherboard explained, Doom is compatible with many devices because id Software wanted it to be. id Software released Doom‘s source code to the public in 1997 for reuse. Doom has been modified to run in ASCII and on a number of platforms including ATMs and printers.
The latest hack of Doom comes from developer Rich Whitehouse. He exploited the fact that Roomba self-driving vacuum robots create maps of your house as they sweep up. iRobot CEO Colin Angle swears he will totally never sell maps of your home to advertisers. Despite the CEO’s assurances, Mr. Whitehouse demonstrates that these maps can be exported. He uses the Roomba maps to create Doomba a tool that converts Roomba maps for use in Doom. Mr. Whitehouse told Digital Trends.
There’s a lot going on under the hood, though. The Roomba is broadcasting a position and angle across the network in roughly one second intervals, as well as a bunch of other data. I write the relevant data out to a .noeroomba file as it comes in. When you go to load that .noeroomba file [into my own tool] Noesis, that’s when the magic happens.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.