Doom can now "run" on a DNS database, and one of the technology's pioneers says, "I can't decide whether this is terribly terrible or terribly delicious."

The database apparently works somewhat like a "librarian" and does not perform actual computations.

Apparently the database acts a bit like a "librarian" and doesn't do the actual calculations.

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In the early 2000s, the constant question was whether a powerful system could run Crysis. These days, what matters is whether or not Minimal can run Doom. We have seen a positive answer to this question for vapes, motherboard bios and even pregnancy tests. and now A DNS database

To be clear, we've seen Doom break into textual DNS records before, but this time it looks like the database does more than file storage. This new version is provided by Corey Quinn at The Register, who explains: "I've compiled Doom for a 32-bit machine that has its account and memory in DNS."

DNS, for those not in the know, stands for "Domain Name System" and is the system that translates URLs into IP addresses that computers can actually interact with to visit. You can also create your own DNS databases with your own entries.

Kevin realized that such a database could essentially be used as a "librarian," pulling pre-built answers to the relevant operations: "The database itself is 6.4 million rows of truth tables."

One of the original pioneers of DNS, Paul Vixie, said: "I can't decide if this is delicious. Terrible or terribly delicious. Either way, it's the best use of RFC 2136 DNS UPDATE I've ever seen."

DNS UPDATE is what allows changing DNS records, this is what is needed to change and update values and variables in the game world. Here's the key trick, as far as I can tell: Kevin realized that there was enough similarity in how DNS works that basically the usual "if this, then that" code is repeated.

I want to be very clear here: this is not DNS pretending to be CPU. Kevin says. Instruction decoding is done ahead of time by a compiler. BIND never executes the command itself. All it sees is a key-value read, a conditional write, and 6.4 million rows of precomputed responses.

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"It's not really a computer, but a very good database. And that's enough."

Yes, that's right: 6.4 million rows. And it's hardly a fast experience, as an update takes just over 54 seconds: "Doom says its tick rate is 35 per second, so 'playable' is one tick every 28.6 milliseconds. I'm at 54,000 milliseconds, which is three orders of magnitude away from victory."

So, not exactly a hands-on gaming experience, but a fun project for sure. Coin has released the code on GitHub if you want to try it out, so give it a try.

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Jacob put his hands on a gaming computer for the first time when he was about 12 years old. He quickly realized that the local computer repair shop had ripped him off with his build and vowed to never let another soul build his rig again. With this vow, Yaqub the hardware addict was born. Since then, Jacob has led a double life as a hardware geek, semi-philosophical professional, first working as a hardware writer for PCGamesN in 2020, then working on a PhD in philosophy for a few years while working for sites like TechRadar, Pocket-lint, Pocket-lint, and Pocket-lint. Eventually, he gave up the brutal mercenary life and joined the world's #1 PC gaming site full-time. He assures us that it is definitely not a carnal thing.

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