If you thought running the classic 1993 shooter Doom on a medical ultrasound scanner was ridiculous, this next one will have you in orbit. According to ZDnet, an Icelandic software developer named Ólafur Waage has successfully ported Doom to run on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) OPS-SAT satellite. Specifically, Waage hacked the OPS-SAT’s flight computer, which is “10 times more powerful than any current ESA spacecraft,” as The Register puts it.While Doom enthusiasts have for years hacked the Id Software classic to run on a staggering array of earth-bound objects, from a nicotine vape to the MacBook Pro Touch Bar to a Samsung washing machine to human gut bacteria, the game — famously set on Mars — had yet to leave the troposphere.Before we blast off, an important caveat: a lot of headline grabbing Doom ports aren’t technically “running” the game at all. Some of them, like the infamous pregnancy test experiment, simply use an exotic device’s screen as an output, while an external computer processes the game’s code.This one is different — and likely one of the most expensive Doom ports to date. As ZDNet tells it, Waage had a little help from some high-powered friends, like ESA engineer Georges Labrèche.“It was as much a work of his as it was mine and the whole ESA team,” Waage said of the achievement at the latest Ubuntu Summit.In a video summarizing the whole experiment, Waage explains that the satellite technically has no screen, and that “even if it did, it would take a pretty good telescope to see what was going on.”Initially, the team wrote a script for the satellite’s computer to update mission control with the current stats of the Doom demo, where the game simulates a player running through a pre-set number of actions, like slaying enemies, picking up items, and discovering secret locations.“A text output saying you ran Doom is nice, but it’s not nice enough,” the programmer said. “What we wanted was a screenshot of the satellite playing Doom.”The only wrinkle was that OPS-SAT has no graphics card, meaning it wasn’t capable of generating any footage the way computers do on Earth. However, the satellite does have an on-board camera facing the ground — and that gave the programmers some ideas.Using some orbital software wizardry, the team rejiggered OPS-SAT’s camera to spit out a screenshot of the gameplay at specific times, paring down the pixels into a color range fitting Doom’s 1993 limitations. For an added bonus, they ran a script to replace the in-game sky with an actual live image taken of the Earth, leading to some visually arresting material.While Waage technically hacked the satellite to get Doom running, his work wasn’t malicious. OPS-SAT is described as a “flying laboratory” meant to enable orbital computing experiments like this one. The craft boasts a number of similar “firsts,” according to Waage, including the first digital chess game in orbit and the first stock market trade executed in space.“The point was to break the curse of being too risk-averse with multi-million-dollar spacecraft,” Waage explained.More on satellites: Scientists Oppose Huge Array of Mirrors in Space That Shines Nighttime Sunlight on Wealthy CustomersThe post Hacker Gets “Doom” Running on Satellite in Outer Space appeared first on Futurism.