Someone Ran DOOM on a 20-Year-Old Office Phone (Yes, Really)
If you’ve ever seen those “it runs DOOM” posts and thought, “okay, but how far can people take this?” —
here’s a new entry for the hall of fame: DOOM running on an old-school office desk phone.
This project was spotted on the Adafruit blog, and it’s a fun reminder that “boring” hardware can still be hacked into something amazing.
The Hardware: A Classic VoIP Desk Phone
The target device is a Snom 360 VoIP office phone — the kind you’d expect to see in an office lobby or a call center,
not running a 90s FPS.
The challenge is that this phone was never meant to be a “general purpose” computer in the way we think of a Raspberry Pi or a PC.
So getting DOOM on it meant digging into firmware, storage, hardware access, and writing custom low-level code.
Full technical write-up (highly recommended if you want the deep details):
Running Doom on a 20-Year-Old Snom 360 Office Phone (0x19.co)
What Makes This Port Extra Cool
- Reverse engineering was required. The developer had to understand how the phone’s display and keyboard work at a low level,
then write their own drivers to talk to the hardware. - Tiny display constraints. The phone uses a small monochrome screen, so the game has to be scaled and converted to 1-bit output.
- Old device, modern tooling. This is a great example of using today’s reverse-engineering workflow (firmware extraction, shell access, cross-compiling)
to breathe new life into older electronics.
Student Takeaway: Why This Matters (Even If You’re Not a Reverse Engineer Yet)
You don’t need to be porting DOOM to learn from this.
What matters is the mindset: treat devices as systems you can understand.
Even “closed” gadgets often have firmware, storage, debug pads, and software layers you can explore.
If you’re into embedded systems, cybersecurity, or robotics competitions, this kind of curiosity is a superpower.
If you want a quick community version of the story, the creator also shared it here:
“My office phone runs doom” on r/itrunsdoom
Extra: The “It Runs DOOM” Tradition Lives On
DOOM is basically the unofficial benchmark for “can I run custom code on this thing?”
Every new port is part engineering, part comedy, and part proof that learning embedded systems doesn’t have to be boring.
Want to geek out on the full process? Start with the deep-dive:
https://0x19.co/post/snom360_doom/
