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WTF?! It's long been established that Doom can be made to run on pretty much anything with a screen, but this ability goes beyond mere devices. The latest example of the classic FPS's legendary portability involves Microsoft Paint essentially being used as a monitor that displays the original shareware version of the game – and the project was developed by Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich.
Called DoomPaint, Russinovich's creation doesn't literally execute Doom inside Microsoft's drawing app. Instead, ViZDoom, a ZDoom-based platform designed primarily for AI research, runs the engine and renders it headlessly. It loads the genuine shareware DOOM1.WAD for the first episode, while maps not included with that release use the BSD-licensed Freedoom WADs.
Every rendered frame is placed on the Windows clipboard as a bitmap and pasted onto the Paint canvas as a genuine document edit. A low-level keyboard hook captures the usual movement, strafing, shooting, and door-opening controls while Paint remains the active window, preventing the keystrokes from affecting the drawing app.
