This PDF Contains a Playable Copy of Doom
Freeman writes:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/01/this-pdf-contains-a-playable-copy-of-doom/
Here at Ars, we're suckers for stories about hackers getting Doom running on everything from CAPTCHA robot checks and Windows' notepad.exe to AI hallucinations and fluorescing gut bacteria. Despite all that experience, we were still thrown for a loop by a recent demonstration of Doom running in the usually static confines of a PDF file.
On the Github page for the quixotic project, coder ading2210 discusses how Adobe Acrobat included some robust support for JavaScript in the PDF file format.
[...] the Doom PDF can take inputs via the user typing in a designated text field and generate "video" output in the form of converted ASCII text fed into 200 individual text fields, each representing a horizontal line of the Doom display. The text in those fields is enough to simulate a six-color monochrome display at a "pretty poor but playable" 13 frames per second (about 80 ms per frame).
[...] have to dock at least a few coolness points because the port doesn't actually work on generic desktop versions of Adobe Acrobat-you need to load it through a Chromium-based web browser. But the project gains those coolness points back with a web front-end that lets users load generic WAD files into a playable PDF.
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