Developer gets Doom running through a DNS database
A developer built a version of Doom that uses a DNS database for its arithmetic and memory. The database contains 6.4 million rows of truth tables and acts like a librarian, with instruction decoding handled ahead of time by a compiler. DNS pioneer Paul Vixie said he was unsure whether to find the project delightfully bad or badly delightful.
Doom has already been coaxed onto unusual hardware, including vapes, a motherboard BIOS, and a pregnancy test. Earlier projects stored Doom data in DNS text records, but this build goes further by placing arithmetic and memory inside a DNS database. Developer Corey Quinn compiled it for a 32-bit machine, using 6.4 million rows of truth tables.
DNS normally maps domain names to IP addresses, yet its update mechanism, RFC 2136, lets records change. Quinn says a compiler handles instruction decoding beforehand, so BIND only performs key-value reads and conditional writes. Each update takes about 54 seconds, far slower than Doom's 35-tic-per-second target. The code is on GitHub.
This curiosity may mainly affect programmers, retro-gaming fans, and network engineers by showing how ordinary infrastructure can be repurposed in unexpected ways. It could inspire creative experiments in constrained computing and DNS misuse, while also prompting security-minded administrators to think about unusual database traffic. As an impractical demo, it is unlikely to change how games run or how DNS is normally used, but it may broaden public appreciation for both fields.