Doom Ported to 1995’s Casio Loopy, Thermal Stickers Included

A developer behind the YouTube channel Throaty Mumbo has demonstrated a playable port of Doom on the Casio Loopy, a 32-bit console released exclusively in Japan in 1995. Originally marketed to young girls and home to just 10 official retail games, the machine’s headline feature was a built-in thermal sticker printer.

The port runs via the Floopy Drive, an open-source flash cartridge for the system. Drawing inspiration from the official Super Nintendo release, the project began on an emulator before moving to original hardware. Initial builds suffered from low frame rates and broken audio, requiring two days of dedicated profiling to achieve playable speeds.

Audio presented a unique architectural challenge. Although the Loopy hardware natively handles MIDI, it lacks the Roland SC-55 soundbank used by the MS-DOS original, resulting in severely mismatched instruments and desynchronized drums. The developer used the Claude language model to narrow down and map equivalent instruments across the console's available voices. To handle discrete sound effects, Throaty Mumbo modified the Floopy Drive with a Raspberry Pi RP2040 and a PCM5102 digital-to-analog converter, piping PCM audio directly through the cartridge pins.

Visually, the port displays heavier pixelation than standard PC hardware, but its performance is comparable to the SNES version. That parity is notable because the Loopy runs the game entirely on its own processor, without the help of hardware accelerators like Nintendo’s Super FX chip.

The adaptation wrapped up with a custom pastel cartridge label matching the console's exterior and a screenshot of an in-game demon printed directly from the console's thermal printer into an official Loopy sticker album.

Source: habr

Video: Throaty Mumbo on YouTube