DOOM launched in Paint - at 35 FPS and with the ability to undo death

From a technical standpoint, Paint merely acts as a display.

Recently, fans of the cult shooter drew attention to a project by Microsoft Azure's CTO. Mark Russinovich proposed running DOOM in the Paint drawing program.

In this case, Paint doesn't perform any calculations; it simply acts as a display. The real "DOOM engine" runs separately: a frame is rendered, then copied to the clipboard, and then automatically pasted into the Paint canvas as a regular image. As a result, the player sees the familiar shooter within the program's interface.

This method of running DOOM allows achieving 35 FPS at a resolution of 320 x 200 or even 640 x 400. Sound effects and music are preserved. The developer explained that ViZDoom executes N ticks in simulation for each rendered frame: "N is calculated based on the actual elapsed time, so the game runs at normal speed regardless of how slowly Paint is running."

The "CTRL + Z" combination will allow rewinding time — if the player dies, they can simply roll back the frames and try again.

Mark Russinovich published the source code for the "DoomPaint" project on GitHub (repository markrussinovich).