A 35fps hack inside an image editor
Mark Russinovich, Azure’s chief technology officer, did what most would call a bit of a waste of time and also something incredibly clever. He used a clipboard-based trick to get the original shareware version of Doom running inside Microsoft Paint. The result? A game that runs at a steady 35fps — not bad for a 30-year-old game inside a 25-year-old image editor.
This is no accident. Paint itself doesn’t run the engine; it only displays what’s pasted. The actual game logic runs in the background using ViZDoom and Freedoom WAD files.
The end result is a bizarre but functional version of Doom — one that includes sound and music. According to Russinovich, 35fps is a reasonable speed for a game like this, and part of the charm comes from that low frame rate. If you want to try it, the setup is on GitHub.
Doom has always been the kind of game that runs just about anywhere. From gut bacteria to pregnancy tests, it’s been on nearly everything. But Paint? That’s still a surprise. The hack proves it’s more about imagination than power.