Players still find crazy ways to play the good old Doom. One particularly inventive player came up with the idea of playing Doom on a device powered solely by potatoes. After initial failures, it finally led to the proverbial potato computer. Find out here on MeinMMO what this devilish fellow did.
What’s the deal with Doom and weird devices? In the gaming community, it’s a kind of pastime to get the good old shooter Doom running on all sorts of possible and impossible devices. Among them have been the displays of high-tech cars, printer displays, and even an electronic pregnancy test (via GameStar) was able to run the shooter ancestor.
The reddit user onesmallserving also wanted to play Doom on an unusual device, but he couldn’t think of any more. So he came up with the idea to play the game on a device powered solely by potatoes.
200 Potatoes Become the Stinking Mega-Battery
How is that supposed to work? Curiously, potatoes can generate energy when they are cooked, halved, and then fitted with a copper coin and wires and connected in series. However, such a half potato doesn’t produce much electricity.
Onesmallserving wanted to play Doom on the Raspberry Pi single-board computer, which needed much more power. To achieve this, he cooked and wired dozens of potatoes over several days together with his wife and a friend. In the end, his entire garage was filled with series-connected potatoes that were emitting a foul smell and slowly decaying. About 200 potatoes were at work here, forming a gigantic potato battery.
Unfortunately, the current was too weak, and the Raspberry Pi wouldn’t start.
How did the experiment end? Onesmallserving was bitterly disappointed and spent the whole day thinking about how he could save his potato power idea before the potatoes turned into stinking dirt. By this time, the garage was hardly accessible, as it smelled so bad in there.
Then he got the idea to simply use a calculator with a display, a Texas Instruments TI-84, as the output device. It requires much less current, and Doom runs on it as well.
So he removed the batteries from the device and instead built a connection for the wires of the potato reactor.
And indeed, electricity flowed, and the calculator powered up. Onesmallserving could play Doom, but the abhorrent stench of 200 rotten potatoes eventually made him call it quits after a few slain demons. But onesmallserving had succeeded: he had literally gotten Doom running on a “potato computer.”
However, he stated that he would now hate potatoes with all his soul, as the smell had ruined the otherwise delicious tubers for him forever. Potatoes have always been a popular means of setting gaming records. A player built a functional gamepad out of potatoes and played Minecraft with it.
