In the latest episode of “Can it run DOOM?” We look at one developer’s effort into hacking an Apple Lightning to HDMI dongle to run the videogame, known for its ability to operate in the most unimaginable places – including Macbook’s Touch Bar, for example.
The DOOM Dongle
According to Tom’s Hardware, this Apple Lightning Digital AV Adapter comes with a built-in Samsung SoC that contains an ARM Cortex-A5 processor operating at just 400MHz, along with 256MiB of RAM. While that doesn’t sound like a whole lot, it’s more than enough for DOOM’s system requirements: any 386-based processor (which operates as low as 12.5MHz), and 4MB of RAM.
Now, you may ask: why is there an SoC inside a dongle? It turns out that the dongle only supports USB 2.0 standard, which is too slow for HDMI; instead, Apple opted to compress the signal data from the host device, and uses the onboard SoC to decompress the video signal to the HDMI display. Since this dongle has nothing more than the chip and RAM, everything else, such as input controls and firmware modifications, has to be done through a separate device.
That’s not the end of it, as the developer said he intends to improve on this with audio and direct controller support without needing a separate laptop (he used MacBook in this case), and users with jailbroken iOS systems may be able to try it out once he releases the package in the future.
Pokdepinion: Perhaps there are developers somewhere trying to shove the game into wilder places as we speak.
