Azure CTO Runs Real Doom Engine Inside Microsoft Paint

Overview

• Mark Russinovich published DoomPaint on GitHub over the weekend, releasing the code, resources and an MIT license so others can reproduce the experiment.
• The project runs the actual Doom engine (ViZDoom) with the shareware DOOM1.WAD and BSD-licensed Freedoom maps and then places every rendered frame on the Windows clipboard to be pasted into Paint’s canvas as a real document edit.
• Russinovich implemented workarounds that use a single OLE data object and frame-ready signaling so Paint reliably reads each frame and avoids race conditions that previously broke clipboard pastes.
• On capable PCs DoomPaint can display at roughly Doom’s native 35 frames per second at 320×200, includes sound and music, and produces quirky side effects such as Ctrl+Z stepping backward through pasted frames because each frame is an undo step.
• The release follows a long history of Doom being used as a technical testbed and highlights how a senior Microsoft engineer’s hobby project can teach developers about Windows clipboard, OLE and Paint’s document model while inviting community exploration.