This is a port of PrBoom, which is a port of the original 1993 ID software hit game Doom, to the ESP32. It runs on an ESP32 which has 4MiB of flash and 4MiB of PSRAM connected.
This is a proof-of-concept and not an official application note. As such, this code is entirely unsupported by Espressif.
This code is an esp-idf project, but due to the use of PSRAM as generally allocatable memory, as of the time of writing of this document you specifically need a PSRAM-capable toolchain and esp-idf version. See this thread for more information on where to get this. Obviously, you also need a board or module with both an ESP32 as well as PSRAM, like the ESP-Wrover module or ideally the Esp-Wrover-KIT development board with an ESP-Wrover module fitted.
Please run make menuconfig before compiling, and browse through the options in the ESP32-Doom platform-specific menu. You may need
It is possible to play Doom using a PlayStation 1 or PlayStation 2 controller. These are the default GPIOs ESP32-Doom expects it to be connected
to, although a different pinout can be selected using make menuconfig.
Pin GPIO CLK 14 DAT 27 ATT 4 CMD 2
Also connect the power and ground lines. Most PS1/PS2 controllers work fine from a 3.3V power supply, if a 5V one is unavailable. Note that the default controller connections are different from the one used in the ESP32 NES-emulator, because GPIO16 and 17 are occupied by the PSRAM.
The main Doom binary can be built and flashed using make flash.
Doom also needs game data, and ESP32-Doom expects this data to be put in a separate partition. In theory, the game data can be the wad from any Doom/Doom2 version. However, for a 4MiB Wrover32, only a cut-down version of the shareware game data will fit. You can download that data here and flash it into the ESP32s flash using a command similar to:
python $IDF_PATH/components/esptool_py/esptool/esptool.py --chip esp32 --port "/dev/ttyUSB1" --baud 230400 --before default_reset --after hard_reset write_flash --flash_mode dio --flash_freq 40m --flash_size detect 0x100000 doom1-cut.wad
If you want to use a commercial variant of the Doom game data (doom1.wad, doom2.wad, ...), you will need an ESP32-Wrover with 16MiB of flash. To flash it, it should be sufficient to modify partitions.csv to increase the 'wad' partition to a size that's big enough, then flash in the data file using the above command line.
- Because PrBoom expects its own data in the available .wad-files but these aren't available in ESP32-Doom, some features may crash the program. In
particular, bringing up the majority of the menus will cause a crash.
- ESP32-DOOM does not support sound or music.
- ESP32-DOOM does not support saving or loading of savegames.
Doom is released by iD software in 1999 under the Gnu GPL. PrBoom is a modification of this code; its authors are credited in
the components/prboom/AUTHORS file. The ESP32 modifications are done by Espressif and licensed under the Apache license, version 2.0.