Husqvarna lawn mower Automower NERA (bottom left) and the first generation DOOM screen
Many readers who opened this article after seeing the title probably had no idea what the author was talking about. It’s not like I’m confused or anything; this is a true and very serious story. I would be happy if you could read it to the end without closing the article here.
swedishHusqvarnaFounded in 1689, we are a long-established company with over 300 years of tradition. In recent years, as a lawn mower manufacturer, it has been selling electric automatic lawn mowers mainly in Europe and other countries. What is the combination of that lawnmower and DOOM?
DOOM is familiar to users who have used PCs since the MS-DOS era.
DOOM in action on the Husqvarna lawn mower Automower NERA
For old-style PC users like me, the name “DOOM” is greeted with nostalgia, so I don’t think it needs any explanation, but younger PC users may not be familiar with it. You may not know what DOOM is in the first place, so let me explain.
DOOM was created in 1993 by id Software, a software company founded by John Carmack, who was already known as a genius programmer at the time (he later became CTO of Oculus VR, a pioneering VR HMD company that was acquired by Meta). It is said to be a pioneer of FPS games (First Person Shooter, a style of game where the player becomes the main character and defeats enemies by shooting).
The game was released for MS-DOS (or its IBM version, PC-DOS) as an IBM PC-compatible game, and quickly gained popularity. Another reason for its popularity is that it has a network battle function, which allows you to play against players who are playing on other PCs on a network such as a LAN.
In Japan, in 1993, several years had passed since IBM began commercially selling PC-DOS/V in 1990, and the oligopoly market for the PC-9800 series gradually became known as DOS/V machines. It was time to transition to IBM PC compatible PCs, and it had become a trend to buy a DOS/V PC and play DOOM. At the time, PC enthusiasts coined the term “DOOM sickness” (a condition similar to car sickness due to the screen flashing).
After that, DOOM evolved into Doom II and Doom 3, and after that, id Software itself was acquired by EA (Electric Arts), and the rights to DOOM etc. came to be managed and sold by Bethesda Softworks, and Bethesda Softworks is now a company under Microsoft.
The one that is running is the Arm native version. On Cortex-M4
What’s moving is just that DOOM
This DOOM was not an emulation of the x86 version, but was developed based on a version ported to Arm by user volunteers, like a so-called MOD, and was an Arm native version.
The CPU is a Cortex-M4 CPU, which is a low-spec CPU rather than the high-performance Arm CPU used in high-end smartphones. Even so, the specs are sufficient to run DOOM. I actually played the game and found that the response speed was sufficient.
Lawn mower board, running on CPU Cortex-M4
This lawnmower-specific DOOM will be released as an update via the Internet to users using Automower NERA. This time, the network battle function of the original DOOM, which was not available in the version released to such users, was recreated using Wi-Fi, and a surreal DOOM battle of lawnmower vs. lawnmower was also realized… An adult playing a game with a lawnmower…Is this something amazing or not?
This lawn mower is apparently sold by Husqvarna in Sweden, so if you’re a reader who really wants to play DOOM with a lawn mower, why not go to Sweden and buy one…Japan’s Radio Law I have no idea if it’s cleared or not!
