Gaming on a McDonalds Cash Register: Guy Runs Doom on Abandoned Machine

Doom is an icon in the gaming world, no questions asked. In fact, it was so popular that anyone growing up in the '90s would have at least played it for a few minutes, or seen someone play it. Part of what certified Doom into gaming folklore was the enthusiasm for it in the maker community, and Doom was ported into almost every conceivable machine. Now, 26 years since its debut on MS-DOS, Doom has been ported into the world's unlikeliest gaming PC -- an abandoned McDonalds cash register.

The person in question was Ryan Edgar, a 19-year-old who happened to visit a nearby McDonalds store, and upon finding out that they were doing away with their vintage cash register computers, procured one for himself. As disclosed by Kotaku Australia, Edgar then brought the computer home, hooked it up with his own PC, downloaded ZDOOM (or, Doom ported to run on Windows XP) on it, and subsequently ran it on the McDonalds machine through a USB connection.

Edgar further used a USB splitter to hook up a keyboard and a mouse, and voila! He shared the results of his brainwave on Twitter, which certainly brought in the plaudits, as well as the long-standing ticker about Doom working on literally any machine that you can get your hands on. There is, however, some sort of technical similarity in the code base of McDonalds' old cash registers and Doom, since both were built to run on MS-DOS, and were subsequently ported to run on Windows XP.

Kotaku's report states that Edgar is now looking forward to running Sega's 2001 classic, Sonic Adventure 2, on his newfound gaming machine. While it'll certainly remain a one-off, it just goes on to show how popular Doom was, the industry it built, and how gaming adventures still go well beyond snazzy graphics and chicken dinners.