Doom entirely from DNS records
This project cleverly abuses DNS TXT records to serve the entirety of Doom's assets, allowing the game to be played by fetching everything over DNS queries. It's a spectacular demonstration of pushing a system far beyond its intended purpose, delighting the Hacker News community with its sheer technical audacity. The feat extends the legendary 'can it run Doom?' meme to an entirely new, absurd, and brilliant level.
The Lowdown
A new project demonstrates the seemingly impossible: playing Doom entirely by sourcing its assets from DNS records. The developer, resumex, realized that while DNS primarily maps names to IP addresses, its TXT records can store arbitrary data. Leveraging this, they compressed the shareware version of Doom and split it into nearly 2,000 DNS TXT records hosted on Cloudflare.
The system works as follows:
- The full Doom WAD file and .NET game engine DLLs are split and stored across DNS TXT records.
- Cloudflare's global edge caching ensures these records are freely and quickly available worldwide.
- A PowerShell 7+ script retrieves these records at runtime, compiling the game data without ever writing the WAD to disk.
- The modified
managed-doomengine then runs the game, loading the DLLs directly into memory. - The project provides scripts for both playing and uploading the game assets to your own Cloudflare zones, including features for multi-zone striping to overcome free-tier limits and resume interrupted uploads.
This ingenious hack highlights the creative potential of repurposing existing infrastructure in unexpected ways, turning a fundamental internet protocol into an unlikely game delivery system.
The Gossip
Running vs. Loading Rumpus
A significant point of discussion centered on the project's title and the precision of the phrase 'run Doom entirely from DNS records'. Many commenters argued that Doom isn't 'running' on DNS itself, but rather 'loading' its assets from DNS, with the actual execution happening on a local machine. They emphasized that DNS is being abused for storage, not computation. However, some speculated playfully on whether DNS could, in fact, be twisted to perform computational tasks, albeit slowly, adding a nuanced layer to the debate.
Delightfully Absurd Doom Deeds
The community overwhelmingly celebrated the project as a brilliant and absurd technical stunt, fitting perfectly into the long-standing tradition of making Doom run on the most unconventional platforms imaginable. Users extended the meme, humorously suggesting future targets like the MONIAC (a hydraulic computer) or even the ENIAC, and imagining 'Ping-as-Storage' as the next frontier for Doom's endless adaptability. This theme underscores the hacker spirit of pushing boundaries and finding creative, often ridiculous, solutions.
Data Delivery Diversions
Commenters drew parallels to other creative or unconventional data storage and retrieval methods. Mentions included projects like 'pingfs' (a filesystem over ICMP ping packets) and 'dnsfs' (a DNS-based filesystem), as well as the satirical 'Harder Drive' YouTube video which explores extreme data storage. This discussion highlighted that while novel, abusing protocols like DNS for data persistence has a rich history of innovative (and often impractical) implementations.