You’ve seen it. That grainy, monochromatic footage of a tiny plastic stick—something usually reserved for life-altering medical news—suddenly displaying the pixelated hellscapes of the 1993 classic Doom. It feels fake. It looks like a fever dream. But the reality of Doom running on a pregnancy test is actually a masterclass in hardware hacking that reveals a lot about how far computing has come.
It happened back in 2020. A programmer named Foone Turing decided to see just how much punishment a digital pregnancy test could take. People lost their minds. Some thought it was a hoax, while others assumed the test's internal "brain" was secretly a supercomputer.
Neither is quite right.
The Hardware Reality Check
Most people think a pregnancy test is just a piece of paper that turns pink. Digital ones are different. They contain a tiny microcontroller, a battery, and an LCD screen. But here is the kicker: that hardware is incredibly weak. We are talking about a processor that exists solely to read an optical sensor and tell you "Pregnant" or "Not Pregnant." It doesn't have a GPU. It doesn't have a gigabyte of RAM. It doesn't even have a real screen capable of rendering 3D graphics.
So, how did Foone actually pull off Doom running on a pregnancy test?
Honestly, they didn't—at least not in the way you might think. The original hardware inside the shell was almost entirely replaced. The internal processor of a standard Equate or Clearblue digital test isn't reprogrammable in a way that allows for complex game logic. To make it work, Foone swapped the existing microcontroller for a Microchip PIC32 and replaced the primitive LCD with a tiny 128x32 pixel monochrome OLED display.
The shell remained. The soul changed.
It’s basically a Ship of Theseus situation. If you replace the brain and the eyes of the device, is it still a pregnancy test? For the sake of the "Can it run Doom?" meme, the internet collectively decided that yes, it counts.
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Why This Became a Legend
The "Will it run Doom?" subculture is obsessed with the absurd. We’ve seen the game running on John Deere tractors, Porsche 911 dashboards, and even inside a Minecraft block. But the pregnancy test hit differently because of the contrast. You’re taking a piece of disposable medical tech—something you literally throw away after one use—and forcing it to run the most influential first-person shooter in history.
It’s hilarious. It’s also a bit of a commentary on e-waste.
Think about it. We are putting microprocessors into things that we use for ten seconds and then toss into a landfill. These "disposable" chips are more powerful than the computers that took humans to the moon. When we see Doom running on a pregnancy test, we are seeing a hardware hacker highlight the sheer absurdity of modern manufacturing.
Breaking Down the Tech Specs
To get the game running, you need a few things:
- A display that can actually show more than two words.
- A microcontroller with enough flash memory to hold the "WAD" file (the game data).
- A way to input commands (Foone used a Bluetooth keyboard).
The original screen on these tests is a "segmented" LCD. That means it has pre-set shapes (like the words "PREGNANT") that can only be turned on or off. You can't draw pixels on it. That's why the screen swap was the most critical part of the project. Once the OLED was in place, the PIC32 controller acted as the heavy lifter, pushing the 3D engine's frames to that tiny, glowing rectangle.
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The Misconceptions
One of the biggest myths is that you can just "plug a USB" into a pregnancy test and start gaming. You can't. You'd need to be proficient in soldering, C programming, and circuit design.
Another weird rumor? That the pregnancy test’s original CPU is actually powerful. It’s not. Most of these use a Holtek HT48R05 or similar, which has about 1KB of program memory. For context, the original Doom executable is about 2,000 times larger than that. You aren't running anything on the stock chip except a basic timer and a sensor check.
But that doesn't make the feat any less impressive. The engineering required to fit a custom board, a new screen, and a power source into a tiny plastic housing designed for urine samples is genuinely difficult. It’s "cramming" at its finest.
What This Means for the Future of Hacking
Why do people keep doing this? It isn't just for the Reddit upvotes.
Projects like Doom running on a pregnancy test serve as a gateway for people to learn about embedded systems. It demystifies the black boxes we carry in our pockets. If a hobbyist can make a plastic stick play a video game, it proves that the barriers between "consumer" and "creator" are thinner than we think.
It also pushes the limits of optimization. To get Doom to run on low-power microcontrollers, hackers have to strip the code down to its bare essentials. They have to manage memory like it's gold. This kind of "minimalist" programming is a lost art in an era where most apps use 500MB of RAM just to show a splash screen.
Practical Insights for Aspiring Hardware Hackers
If you want to try something similar, don't start by trying to hack the stock chip of a medical device. It’s a dead end for 99% of people.
Instead, look into the ESP32 or the Raspberry Pi Pico. These are incredibly cheap, tiny boards that can actually handle basic graphics. You can buy a 0.96-inch OLED screen for about five dollars. From there, it's about learning how to use the SPI or I2C protocols to make the "brain" talk to the "eyes."
- Step 1: Learn to blink an LED. It’s the "Hello World" of hardware.
- Step 2: Figure out how to display a single static image on a micro-OLED.
- Step 3: Study the "Chocolate Doom" source code, which is a highly portable version of the game.
Final Thoughts on the Meme
The obsession with Doom running on a pregnancy test isn't going away. It represents a specific brand of internet humor: technical brilliance used for something completely useless. It’s the "because I can" spirit of the hacker community.
Next time you see a digital device at the pharmacy, just know that somewhere inside, there is enough space for a better processor, a better screen, and a trip through E1M1.
Actionable Next Steps:
- Check out Foone Turing’s original Twitter thread for the deep technical breakdown of the hardware swap.
- If you’re interested in "Can it run Doom?" culture, look into the Doom port for the RP2040 microcontroller—it’s one of the most stable ways to play the game on non-PC hardware.
- Explore the world of "bad bios" and retro-porting to understand how 90s code is adapted for modern, tiny chips.