Yes, yes, step right up, folks. Here today to take on the never-ending “Can it run Doom?” challenge: Microsoft Paint! Yes, yes, right up onto the stage here, Microsoft Paint. That’s great, stand right there. And now… yes, yes, a drum roll, perfect… and now, Microsoft Paint, can you run Doom? *collective intake of breath* “Yes! But also no!” If that answer seems a little anticlimactic, wait until you’ve seen DoomPaint in action before you scoff. Its creator, Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, has taken a pretty clever approach to getting Doom to appear in your long-neglected raster paint application. Some might call that approach cheating, but hey, we’re not here to judge. So how does DoomPaint work? Well, it basically uses Paint as a monitor. Russinovich isn’t making any bones about this—as he writes on his GitHub, where the project is available as a free download: “Paint renders the game but does not compute it. Paint computes nothing. Paint has never computed anything.” Doing the computing instead is a Doom source port called VizDoom, which is based on the ubiquitous ZDoom and, as per its website, is designed for “research in machine visual learning and deep reinforcement learning, in particular.” Russinovich’s code creates a wrapper around ViZDoom, hiding the actual ViZDoom window and instead capturing each frame to the Windows clipboard. From there, each frame is pasted directly into Paint, and… voila! For all intents and purposes, you have Doom running in Paint. There’s even sound!