Doom (1993) is a game that can be run on the latest, most high-end gaming rigs or on a literal potato rig if one has the right amount of motivation and skills to do so. It is a cult classic in the video game industry, which brought up fast-paced combat in first-person shooter games.
Back in 1997, the developers of Doom, id Software, did something that doesn't really happen nowadays. They open sourced the code for the Linux port of Doom, allowing anyone to build on it in a non-commercial setting.
Thanks to that, many forks have emerged, each adding its own twist while keeping the fun intact.
And now, Android Authority has managed to get a Doom fork running on Android 16's Linux Terminal by manually building an AOSP image with the necessary tweaks.
Running Doom In Android 16: What's Going On?
They tested this out on a Pixel 9 Pro smartphone with the custom AOSP build consisting of two unreleased bits of support for Android 16's Linux Terminal(powered by AVF) that Google is still currently working on: hardware acceleration and a fully-fledged graphical environment.
After activating the new “Display activity” feature, the testers ran the weston command to launch a graphical environment and enabled hardware acceleration. If you didn't know, Weston is a Wayland compositor that provides a basic desktop environment for non-desktop use cases.
Subsequently, they proceeded to install Chocolate Doom, a port of Doom that aims to be more like the DOS version of Doom (the one that was originally released), to see whether it would run.
The results, well, as demonstrated by the video above, Doom ran smoothly on Android, without any major FPS drops or glitching.
They also tried running Linux desktop apps like GIMP, but it didn’t work out. The team at Android Authority hopes that, one day, running Linux apps on Android will be possible and just as seamless as it is on Chromebooks.
Sourav Rudra
