i was just thinking and...

[treos]

if DOOM can be run on just about any electronic device then... (with some modifications to the device in question, obviously) could it be possible to run DOOM on an actual potato?

lol that would be incredible.

[phantombeta]

Uhhh... No. A potato does not have any kind of processor.
Doom can't run on "just about any electronic device". It can run on just about any electronic device that has a processor.

[Caligari87]

To be more specific, a potato is a type of battery or a sort of crude / weak power generator. Now, if you were intrepid you could certainly wire up a bunch of potatoes to power a simple computer and then run Doom on that

[phantombeta]

That wouldn't be running Doom on a potato, though. It'd be running Doom on a potato-powered computer.

I think the closest you could get to "running Doom on a potato" would be somehow making something like a 386/486 out of a potato, then running Doom on that.
I... Don't think that's even possible.

[Caligari87]

It's not. It's literally impossible. OP's request is nonsense and probably based on a poor understanding of "GLaDOS on a potato" in Portal 2 (where she uses a potato as... wait for it... a battery).

[Rachael]

Well Raspberry Pi's run on pretty cheap processing power. I don't know if a potato can cut it for the power requirements, but raspberry pi can run Doom, and if you can power that, it's all you need.

[treos]

ah, it was just a random idea. would be pretty cool though if you could.

i've also been wondering something else. why is my laptop so much of a freaking potato PC that doom of all things lags on it occasionally? i mean, i can see project brutality lagging with all the fancy stuff that mod does (and boy does it do some truly awesome things... never get in a fist fight with doom guy. lol). yet, i start playing either a large map like doomone or a mod like doomrpg and the game will start having these occasional slow-downs at random times and i have to just stop and sit there until the frame rate returns to normal.

i figured a game that old, even with mods, would run smoothly on a modern pc or laptop but i guess the mods push the system requirements up a good bit...or something.

[Rachael]

If you're running GZDoom you've got a lot of things vying for your processor's power - and since GZDoom is a deterministic engine the entire game simulation runs on a single core.

Unfortunately, processors have not increased in clock speed a whole heck of a lot since about 2005, so you very quickly have diminishing returns on how well each processor responds to the GZDoom engine based on how you upgrade it. The one thing that kills it the most in both Software and OpenGL is how many 2-sided linedefs are visible on the screen. The other thing that kills it a lot are when 10,000 or more actors are spawning all at once. GZDoom's internal VM has to process all of these actors for every frame, and that adds to the slow-downs. These two things together are guaranteed to choke all but the best computers - and this is despite the fact that drawing is now offloaded to either the GPU itself or to multiple cores in software mode.

As powerful as GZDoom is, it's still very limited by 1993 concepts and a very ancient way of doing things. The irony here is, some of what worked back then and sped things up are what's holding it back now, but yet these things are so much of a foundation to how everything works that they simply cannot be removed without causing serious issues.

[phantombeta]

One thing that should be mentioned is that DoomRPG uses a lot of ACS. It has at least one ACS script for each monster, IIRC. And some of the things it does in ACS can slow the game down quite a bit.