Launching Doom on the orbital OP SAT

Launching Doom on the orbital OP SAT

Engineers from the European Space Agency and Norwegian specialists ran the game Doom on the OP SAT satellite, which operates in Earth orbit. The experiment confirmed that the cult-classic 1993 shooter can be adapted even for a space platform that was never designed for such tasks.

OP SAT in this story serves not as an entertainment device, but as a compact experimental platform about the size of a suitcase. The satellite was created as a kind of testbed in orbit, where software ideas and technological approaches can be tested under real spaceflight conditions.

Why Doom keeps getting ported to anything

Doom has long since turned from just a successful game into an engineering meme and, at the same time, a test of ingenuity. The reasons are both practical and symbolic. The game’s code and architecture are well known and well studied, and the result is easy to recognize, so running Doom becomes a clear demonstration that the device can handle non-trivial tasks at all.

This porting tradition has been sustained for years and constantly expands the list of targets. Doom has been run on washing machines, ATMs, calculators, power banks, headsets, and other electronics that were designed for completely different operating scenarios.

Doom’s low requirements have become legendary

By today’s standards, Doom requires almost no resources—and that’s exactly what makes it possible to run it on literally anything. Pulling off that trick with any game released after 2000 is already much harder. With games released after 2020, it is flat-out impossible. This applies even to arcade-style crash games with extremely simple graphics, such as Lucky Jet, Aviator, Aviatrix, JetX.

As an example, we decided to take a closer look at the game Aviatrix. It was launched in 2022, nearly 30 years after Doom. The title has gained particular popularity in recent months following the active implementation of promotions to attract new players. We discovered this after analyzing several sources of information from search results. Moreover, we visit site about promo codes for the Aviatrix crash game, and there we found not only information about bonuses but also the technical requirements of the title. Analyzing them leads us to conclude that the simplicity of the game’s graphics is just the tip of the iceberg. In reality, it is quite demanding on the hardware it runs on.

With modern games, including arcade games that look simple, it’s not even worth trying to replicate the experiments that were conducted with Doom. A simple review of the technical specifications is enough to understand that the experiment will be doomed to fail from the outset.

The idea started with a single question

The story of the experiment was described by software engineer Oulafur Vaage. At the start, he worked on porting and adapting the game code, including converting individual parts from C to C++, to simplify further building and configuration for a non-standard environment.

The catalyst was a conversation with a colleague, Georges Labreche, who posed the question directly: was it possible to run Doom on a satellite? Vaage noted that he was not an avid gamer, but he was drawn to testing the limits of what was possible, where nostalgia mattered less than engineering logic and careful execution.

A satellite isn’t a console—and that’s the main point

OP SAT differs from familiar gaming devices in that it was created as a platform for experiments and demonstrations, not for entertainment. Its computing subsystem is based on a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor—that is, an architecture common in embedded systems, but far from the typical gaming ecosystem with familiar drivers and graphics libraries.

Under such conditions, running a game becomes a matter of compatibility, constraints, and resource control. Even if the computing power is sufficient, questions remain about graphics output, access to peripherals, operating modes, and also how not to disrupt the satellite’s nominal operations.

Orbital protocols don’t tolerate improvisation

A separate part of the work was safety. Running third-party software on a spacecraft requires strict adherence to procedures, since any error can affect the platform’s stability, the experiment plan, and communications links.

That caution showed up not only in code reviews, but also in the sequence of actions. In projects like these, constraints and control are important, for example the following aspects:

  • predictable CPU and memory load
  • minimizing the risk of freezes and invalid states
  • preserving the priority of the satellite’s nominal tasks

How Doom ended up on OP SAT, step by step

The work progressed gradually, from the simple to the complex. First it was necessary to adapt the codebase, then to make sure that the system could handle the game’s computations at all, and only after that to move on to the visual side, which in space often turns out to be the most finicky.

The chronology of the experiment is described as follows:

  • porting and editing parts of the code, including moving from C to C++
  • running Doom in a no-graphics mode, as a check of computational operability
  • configuring graphics output and preparing visual proof of the result

Earth in the frame—and the palette bottleneck

When the basic run took place, the question of evidence arose. To demonstrate success, the engineers decided to obtain screenshots—not abstract ones, but tied to the space context—and replaced the background images with real photos of Earth taken from the satellite.

Here, the limitation of the game itself became apparent. Doom relies on a 256-color palette, and with such a set of shades, high-quality space images begin to lose detail, gradients turn into harsh bands, and they do not look the way one would expect from modern photography.

Screenshots as a separate engineering task

To reconcile the space photos with the old graphics model, the team applied a machine-learning algorithm to optimize the color mapping, including gamma correction parameters. In essence, it was necessary to choose a color transformation in which the image of Earth remained recognizable, while still fitting within the constraints of the Doom engine.

Perfect shots didn’t always work out due to the camera’s technical limitations and the imaging conditions. As a result, the confirmation of the experiment consisted of several successful screenshots, while the rest of the work remained in the form of process descriptions and technical details that cannot always be fully verified based on external evidence alone without access to telemetry and internal system logs.