DOOM Run in Paint: Azure Exec's Unlikely Gaming Hack

Microsoft Azure's Chief Technology Officer, Mark Russinovich, has taken the popular game DOOM to new limits by running it inside Microsoft Paint. Instead of rebuilding the game, he adapted its original graphics engine to draw each frame directly onto a blank Paint canvas.

The project, called DoomPaint, uses the free shareware version of DOOM and copies every frame to the Windows clipboard before pasting it into Paint. This allows the game to appear inside the application without Paint processing the game itself.

According to Russinovich, 'Paint renders the game but does not compute it. Paint computes nothing. Paint has never computed anything. That's the joke.'

The result is a playable version of DOOM that runs at 35 Hz with a resolution of 320×200. Players can also rewind after taking damage or dying by pressing Ctrl + Z, and save their progress by creating a PNG screenshot using Windows tools.