Can Nintendo’s Alarmo Run Doom? You bet it’s possible

That’s exactly what hacker GaryOberNicht, who recently discovered how to run custom firmware on the Alarmo, did in a video posted yesterday to Mastodon and their X account. In it, they play by turning or pressing the mushroom-shaped blob on top of the Alarmo to move and pressing the other buttons to shoot or open doors. Here, take a look:

Gary said it is “possible to load the shareware version of Doom entirely from USB, without modifying the Alarmo.” And they’ve put the software and instructions to run it on Github, so that almost any Alarmo owner with enough knowledge and determination can do it too. Best of all, you can do this without opening the clock all the way.

How did they accomplish this? Gary explains in a blog post that after another person named Spinda hacked the Alarmo (with a Flipper Zero) and dumped the firmware from memory, Gary worked out a method that uses a USB mode and the USB-C port to point the Alarmo to custom settings external firmware, instead.

Given how easy it seems to reproduce what Gary has done, modding the Alarmo software almost certainly won’t just stop at Fate. Of course, how far the online community’s efforts to turn the Alarmo into a bizarre gaming console will go likely depends on how Nintendo, which has been particularly active with its copyright disputes lately, thinks about that.