Mark Russinovich Modded Doom to Play Inside MS Paint
Because work is overrated, Azure's CTO turned MS Paint into a monitor for Doom using AI code.
Mark Russinovich, the CTO of Azure and creator of Sysinternals, published an open-source project called MS Paint Doom on GitHub. The glue code behind this absurd setup was written in Python with help from Copilot and Claude under the MIT license.
The setup runs a headless ViZDoom engine using the classic shareware DOOM1.WAD file. Instead of drawing pixels directly to a graphics card, the script copies every single rendered frame into the Windows clipboard and pastes it straight onto the canvas as an automated image update.
Native painting mechanics double as game controls: pressing Ctrl+Z actually rewinds time in the game by undoing canvas actions. Players can even use the native file menu to save a screenshot of their current demon-blasting frame as a standard PNG file.
The framerate sits comfortably at spreadsheet levels because Paint performs zero calculations on its own. It simply acts as a remarkably inefficient monitor that receives images pushed into it by the background script.
Running the game only requires Python, the project repository, and a single batch file, joining an elite club of cursed Doom ports that includes running the shooter inside KiCad circuit boards, Microsoft Word documents, PDF files, and an orbiting space satellite.
Software engineering has peaked now that executive cloud engineers spend tech budgets turning simple drawing tools into slideshow-level gaming setups. Some developers build scalable server infrastructure, while others just want to rip and tear inside a bitmap canvas.
Source: Neowin
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