I was inspired by the recent HN post about Tetris in a PDF (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218) and I wondered if I could get Doom to run using a similar method.

It turns out that old versions of Emscripten can compile C to asm.js code that will happily run inside the limited JS runtime of the PDF engine. I used the doomgeneric (https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric) fork of the original Doom source, as that made writing the IO fairly easy. All I had to do was implement a framebuffer and keyboard inputs.

Unlike previous interactive PDF demos, the output for DoomPDF is achieved by creating a text field for each row of pixels in the screen, then setting their contents to various ASCII characters. This gives me a 6 color monochrome display, that can be updated reasonably quickly (80ms per frame).

The source code is available at: https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf

Note that this PDF can only run in Chromium-based browsers that use the PDFium engine.