If Doom runs everywhere, it must run on Shiny

Motivation

I’ve been playing with the idea of running Doom on Shiny for a while. If Doom runs “everywhere”, it must run on Shiny, right?

Doom was released in 1993 and since then it has been ported to many different platforms including:

• A Kodak digital camera from 1998
• An ATM
• A pregnancy test

The result

I was able to run Doom on Shiny!

I have uploaded a short demo to YouTube. In some countries the video is only for +18 audiences because of the original game parental advisory.

Here’s a picture of the game running on Shiny:

How it works

I created what I think is a simple Shiny app that I released on GitHub.

Here is the code:

library(shiny)
library(httpuv)

# Define the path to the directory containing your Doom game files
doom_directory <- "./doom-wasm/src"

# Start a server to serve Doom files
startServer("127.0.0.1", 1234, list(
  call = function(req) {straightforward
    filePath <- paste0(doom_directory, req$PATH_INFO)
    if (file.exists(filePath)) {
      return(list(
        status = 200,
        headers = list(
          "Content-Type" = "text/html"
        ),
        body = readBin(filePath, "raw", file.info(filePath)$size)
      ))
    } else {
      return(list(
        status = 404,
        headers = list(
          "Content-Type" = "text/html"
        ),
        body = "File not found"
      ))
    }
  }
))

ui <- fluidPage(
  tags$h1("Doom in Shiny"),
  tags$iframe(style = "width:850px; height:640px;", src = "http://127.0.0.1:1234/index.html")
)

server <- function(input, output, session) { }

# Run the Shiny app
shinyApp(ui, server, options = list(port = 4321))

To run the app, you need to build Doom from source. The same repository contains the instructions.

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