DOOM Shooter Kept Running for Over Two Years on a 20-Year-Old PDA - Game Eventually Crashed

Recently, the results of another experiment with DOOM were summarized. This time, the shooter was launched on a quite ordinary device.

An ASUS MyPal A620 PDA from the early 2000s was used. Tech enthusiast minki launched DOOM and kept the game running for over two years - until it crashed. All this time, the PDA was running on a "homemade uninterruptible power supply."

The crash is related to a technical feature of the WinDoom port: the gametic counter is used to track game time for various purposes and increments at a rate of 35 Hz, or 35 times per second, regardless of the game's rendering cycle.

Ultimately, the value reached the maximum for 32-bit - 2,147,483,647, at which point an "overflow" occurred and the game crashed. Since the experimenter reduced the tick rate to 30 Hz, the game ran longer.