Doom Runs at 60 FPS in Notepad

Doom
Doom (Image credit: Sam Chiet/YouTube)

Game developer Sam Chiet has found another use for Microsoft Notepad. The ingenious creator has gotten Doom (1993) to run at 60 FPS through the boring text editor in Windows.

Chiet highlighted that he didn't have to modify the Notepad application. Dubbed "NotepadDOOM," the project is fully playable. Although Chiet didn't explain how the mod works, has committed to launching NotepadDOOM for other Doom fans to try out. Chiet said in a subsequent tweet that "it'll take some work to polish NotepadDOOM into something releasable, but it'll almost certainly happen over the next couple days."

John Romero, one of Doom's creators, was impressed and replied to Chiet in a tweet that the mod was "incredible."

You can see the iconic 1993 shooter running in its full glory on Chiet's YouTube channel. It's Notepad, so obviously, Chiet replaced the graphics with characters and numbers. The gameplay looks pretty smooth, although we did catch some screen tearing. However, that could be because Notepad can't write the text fast enough on screen.

Although Doom is over two decades old, the game still holds a special place in gamers' hearts. Bethesda updated Doom with support for 60 FPS and other add-ons in 2020. Over the years, fans have found creative ways to play Doom, such as on a Raspberry Pi Pico, CaptionCall phone, $15 Nokia N-Gage-looking PC, or inside your motherboard's BIOS.

Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • derekullo
    Doom is nice, but ... can it run Crysis?
    Reply
  • DougalDylan
    Admin said:
    Game developer Sam Chiet gets Doom to run in Microsoft Notepad on Windows.

    Doom Runs at 60 FPS in Notepad : Read more
    I thought Notepad was limited to 64K hence MSoft kept trying to get rid of it.
    Reply
  • coromonadalix
    WOW lolll
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    Create keyboard hook
    Form ASCII screen
    Send keys Ctrl a, delete
    Copy text stream to clipboard
    Send keys Ctrl v
    Reply
  • Chung Leong
    digitalgriffin said:
    Create keyboard hook
    Form ASCII screen
    Send keys Ctrl a, delete
    Copy text stream to clipboard
    Send keys Ctrl v

    Nothing that complicated. The text can be set by sending the WM_SETTEXT message to the text control.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    Chung Leong said:
    Nothing that complicated. The text can be set by sending the WM_SETTEXT message to the text control.

    Okay you win. You created the better mouse trap. :). Or is that Doom trap?
    Reply
  • Justin Goldberg
    digitalgriffin said:
    Okay you win. You created the better mouse trap. :). Or is that Doom trap?
    How was this done?!??!?!
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    Justin Goldberg said:
    How was this done?!??!?!
    There are algorithms out there that will render ASCII based on images. Been around a long time. Since the 80s in fact.

    It's just a matter of capturing the active screen and feeding the inputs into the render. A 640x480 input will do
    Reply