The Shores of Bell: Play Doom on Nintendo’s New $99 Alarm Clock

Earlier this week, Twitter user GaryOderNichts managed to hack Nintendo’s Alarmo alarm clock to run the shareware version of Doom, sharing a video of his successful endeavor in a Twitter thread. The footage provided a glimpse into this unique use of the device.

Gary explained in the thread that the project lacks audio support at the moment. To make the Doom shareware .wad work, it must be compressed and then decompressed into the memory upon booting. This is done to bypass limitations related to USB loader memory size. Thankfully, if you’re intrigued and want to try this yourself, you won’t need to tweak your Alarmo. All the necessary project files are conveniently available on GitHub.

Getting Doom to run on an Alarmo might sound complex, but Gary laid out the process in greater detail in a comprehensive blog post. The first step involved examining the Alarmo to figure out the hardware it uses. It turns out, the device is powered by an STM32H730ZBI6 Arm Cortex-M7 processor, which is fortunately well-documented. This clarity allowed Gary to adapt the Alarmo and link it to his Raspberry Pi.

Despite the initial tinkering and soldering involved to get the hack up and running, Gary assures that the version now on GitHub is much more user-friendly. You don’t need to modify your Alarmo to execute the Doom launch from a USB drive.

Playing Doom on Nintendo’s Alarmo is quite the experience, with gameplay centered on the controls located at the top of the clock. These include two buttons and a touch dial that can be pressed or swiped. In this version, swiping is used to aim left and right, while the notification button on the lower right is used for shooting. Other controls weren’t highlighted or utilized in the video, which features one of Doom’s initial levels.

Though a $99 alarm clock doubling as a gaming device is unexpected, the concept isn’t unprecedented. We’ve seen Doom appear in various odd places, such as a smart lawnmower, the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 microcontroller, and even an air hockey table. There was even an expansion card devised for the old Commodore 64 to empower it to run Doom.

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