It’s only a matter of time before your glasses can run Doom. For now, we’ve all got to put up with things like lawnmowers instead. The good news is that office furniture joins the list of things that can run the FPS game. That’s right, thanks to a YouTuber called ctrl-alt-rees, we can all watch it running on an old-school desk PC.
Strangely enough, desk PCs aren’t as outdated as you’d think. While the model in the video is a thing of the past, there are plenty of modern alternatives. Sure, they’re mainly from Lian Li, but you can still pop PC parts into an RGB table if you fancy. After all, there’s something satisfying about saving space—that’s why I mount my monitors.
The PC in the video comes from a UK-based PC company called Time that closed down around 2005. To emphasise its age, the system itself still has a floppy disk drive. Younglings out there will know this as the save icon in just about any program. It also has a CD-ROM drive, which has similarly fallen out of fashion. The mouse is a fun little fossil as well, boasting a ball instead of the contemporary laser or optical alternative. It has a built-in modem, of all things. And the screen is even screwed to the desk, so users simply must deal with the ergonomics as they are. Oh, how far we’ve come.
It’s a nifty little bit of ye olde PC tech (sorry to anyone older than about 25 for that). The video fully unpacks the system, showing off the strange furniture. It’s all the exact colour we think of when imagining a PC from the early 00s: aged white-turned-cream. However, the real fun kicks in after Rees takes the whole thing apart, swaps some parts, and installs DOS and Doom.
The final part of the video shows Rees using Doom on this niche device with ease. It is, as Rees notes at the start of the video, a bit of a meme to say that things can run Doom. Still, it’s no less satisfying to see it in action on just about everything it ends up running on. If you’re someone who has one of these desk PCs lying around, then maybe now’s the time to get it out and follow some of Rees’ steps and get Doom running on it.
