Developer Makes Doom Run Inside a PDF File

Programmers have found ways to run the 1993 first-person shooter Doom on an array of unexpected platforms, and now a PDF file joins that list.

Developer ading2210's DoomPDF project shows the game operating within a document format primarily designed for static content display. The creator says he drew inspiration from pdftris, another PDF-based game port by Thomas Rinsma.

so while were at it.....

[twinirondrives]

Lets make OO languages that objectify that jjust because it's cool undefined behavior

Two thoughts

[93 Escort Wagon]

1) Awesome job!

2) It's not surprising in the least, but the fact that this is even possible makes a good demonstration regarding all that's wrong with modern document formats.

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[helpfulcorn]

I hate stuff like PDFs, when having to open a PDF from someone because of tax info or some other stuff, I always think "what sort of zero day am I executing now?"

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[Darinbob]

It's disappointing to me. PDF should have been a read-only format. It would have been utterly awesome at that. But by making it a read/write format, with scripting, etc, it ruined it. Even with an interpreted language inside (evolution of Postscript) there was no need to add stuff that could read or write files or things like that). Or at the very least, those extra features could have been flagged specificallly in the file header, so that users could disallow for extra protection, a warning could pop u

Alternative headline

[White Yeti]

"Institutional employers one step closer to blocking PDF"

But only if

[Alumoi]

you open it on Chrom*.
So, not really a PDF, right?

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[Sebby]

you open it on Chrom*.

Indeed, can't have it get away from the Privacy Rapists and being used on anything else.

It does make me wonder what Chrom* flaw this exposes.

Video in PDFs

[ZectronPositron]

I personally am dying for PDFs to essentially work like websites, at minimum to embed video. Although technically video is currently already possible, it is hardly supported on any popular platform as far as I can tell. As in, I canâ(TM)t send someone a PDF with a video embedded and expected to work. pleasecorrect me if Iâ(TM)m wrong. This impressive work will hopefully encourage more dynamic use of PDFs! Since PDFs are the de facto document sharing format, we should be able to embed all sorts of things that we want to share with others.

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[pz]

But we already have a gazillion container formats, from general-purpose ones like zip, tar, and gz, to special-purpose ones like mp3 and mp4.

The great thing about PDFs is that you are (very nearly) guaranteed that a document will appear to the reader exactly as it appeared to the writer.

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[laughingskeptic]

Paste this into Perplexity:

Given a text file containing a base64 encoded mpeg video, generate the postscript that uses Javascript and the RichMediaAnnotation that would have to come before and after the lines of base64 text to render this video inside a single page PDF file without relying on Flash components.

I did not verify that the generated Postscript is 100% correct, but it looks like it is on the right track. I did not tell it to exclude Flash on my first query and so Perplexity gave an answer that

Now make a ASCII shell script run Doom

[FudRucker]

So it will run in Linux in a bash shell in any x-terminal

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[gregstumph]

Your wish is some other guy's command... https://github.com/wojciech-gr... [github.com]

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[FudRucker]

Haha! Thanks :)

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[Koen Lefever]

It is not Doom, but Wolfenstein 3D on a Commodore PET [jimbo.itch.io].

I did not have this on my 2025 bingo list

[Mindragon]

Meantime why is PDF editing like legit hard? There is no decent (and I mean like really good) open source programmatic PDF editor. Sucks.

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[ichthus]

What do you mean by "programmatic"? Xournal is pretty good. And, the latest versions of Firefox also allow editing.

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[Uldis Segliņš]

Adding annotations is not really editing. Can you change font, resize or move an object? Delete it? Save in PDF/A-1b without tags?

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[ichthus]

Uhhh.. dammit. No. They.. jusT... an..notaTE. *grits teeth* My mistake.

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[Pieroxy]

You fundamentally misunderstand what PDF was originally. It's not a word processor. It's a "Portable Document Format". There is no text flow, no columns, just lines of text absolutely positioned. This is why you cannot reformat it on another paper size. That's the whole point.

Um?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean that PDFs are capable of more complicated remote code executable attacks?

Postcript is a Turing-Complete language

[williamyf]

Expect then DOOM running in Postcript in 3... 2... 1...

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[Nebulo]

That should be relatively easy, and performant – Ghostscript (the most popular open source Postscript interpreter) is Real Darned Fast and can hook up to a X console for live display.

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[Creepy]

PDF is also supposedly a subset of PostScript. I've heard PDF has some layout features and such, but the programming language itself (supposedly Turing complete) should be compatible.

Not impressive enough

[Baron_Yam]

I want to see Doom running on a Voyager probe.

Presumably slowly, to account for the lag.

Firefox users need not apply.

[Mal-2]

It only works in Chromium-based browsers. This is not the case for pdftris though.