Doom runs on an Apple Lightning to HDMI dongle — SoC inside adapter has enough power for smooth gameplay
This Apple adapter from 2012 has more power than a PC from 1993.

A developer could hack into the Apple Lightning to HDMI dongle and run Doom directly on the accessory. According to nyan_satan’s comments in the YouTube video (h/t MacRumors), the $49 Apple Lightning Digital AV Adapter features a custom Samsung SoC with a 400MHz ARM Cortex-A5 core and 256 MiB of DRAM.
The dongle should be enough to run Doom, which requires a 386 processor and 4MB of RAM. Apple put an SoC inside the dongle because the USB 2.0 protocol that Lightning used did not have the bandwidth required to run HDMI. So, it compressed the data from the Lightning device and then used the chip inside the adapter to decompress it for viewing on HDMI displays.
The adapter runs a simplified version of iOS, but since it doesn’t have persistent storage, the developer used their MacBook to load firmware with a file system. They also use the laptop's connection for controls, but aside from that, everything runs directly on the dongle.
Although Doom runs well already, nyan_satan said the game has yet to hit 60 FPS on the dongle with proper resolution. However, reimplementing the function that populates frames into the framebuffer can vastly improve performance, allowing the game to reach the desired quality on the Apple accessory.
The developer said he plans to release the software behind this Doom project as a package in the future, allowing anyone with a jailbroken iOS device to run it and try it for themselves. In the meantime, he plans to improve it further, like introducing sound output and finding a way to attach a controller to the dongle so you can play Doom without needing a Mac.
Doom is popular among many enthusiasts and developers, with the “But can it run Doom?” becoming a fun challenge to port the old game from 1993 to just about anything. And with the increasing power of chips, even the ones found in adapters and accessories, many people are finding ways to do just that. We’ve seen the game run on the Nintendo smart alarm clock and on a neural chip that uses just one mw, and we’ve also encountered ports of the game on the most unexpected of places, like a Microsoft Word document, a PDF file, and even a Captcha.
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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.
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Shiznizzle "The adapter runs a simplified version of iOS, but since it doesn’t have persistent storage, the developer used their MacBook to load firmware with a file system."Reply
Yeah, as one of the protagonists in Apocalypto said, "Almost, i will call you almost."
Yeah, the cable runs DOOM but also needs the MacBook to run it as it uses its file system.
So the headline, while sensational, is misleading in nature.
Quite a feat nonetheless. -
OldAnalogWorld But SD cards still cannot tell the owner the flash type, SMART, show the wear and condition of the card...2025...Reply -
artk2219 I just find it crazy that they shoved a 400mhz CPU and 256mb of ram into a dongle just for av. That's more power than most people had available to them in the late 90s, and it's just an HDMI adapter, that's already 13 years old. The amount of compute many of us have at our disposal everyday is kind of insane.Reply