"Say it with me, say it loud. "Doom in Space!" You can almost hear the reverb, can't you? Doom, the 1993 game that was once installed on more computers than Windows, is famous for several reasons, including jump-starting the first-person shooter genre and running on pretty much every computing platform you can imagine. This includes everything from lawnmowers to iPods to supercomputers. There are even efforts afoot to get Doom to run on quantum computers."
"OPS-SAT, a "flying laboratory" for testing novel onboard computing techniques, was equipped with an experimental computer approximately 10 times more powerful than the norm for spacecraft. Waag explained, "OPS-SAT was the first of its kind, devoted to demonstrating drastically improved mission control capabilities when satellites can fly more powerful onboard computers. The point was to break the curse of being too risk-averse with multi-million-dollar spacecraft." (The satellite was decommissioned in 2024.)"
Ólafur Waage, a senior software developer from Iceland who works in Norway, ported Doom to the European Space Agency OPS-SAT satellite and ran it in orbit. OPS-SAT functioned as a flying laboratory with an experimental computer roughly ten times more powerful than typical spacecraft hardware, intended to enable more capable and less risk-averse onboard computing; the satellite was decommissioned in 2024. Doom has been open-sourced since 1997, and its simple C code plus decades of community ports made the spacecraft port feasible. The experiment highlights the adaptability of open-source software across unconventional hardware platforms.
Read at ZDNET
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