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‘Doomba’ turns your Roomba’s cleaning maps into Doom levels

‘Doomba’ turns your Roomba’s cleaning maps into Doom levels

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Fight hordes of demons with the help of your Roomba

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Roomba 980

It’s practically a rule in tech: If it has electricity, eventually it will run Doom. Now a Roomba might have been a bit tricky to work into that equation, given the lack of things like a screen, but game developer Rich Whitehouse has found a way with a new tool he calls “Doomba” that can take floor map data from the smart cleaning robots and convert it into Doom levels, according to Polygon.

The idea first started when Whitehouse and his wife were researching robot vacuums. Honestly, nothing will beat Whitehouse’s own explanation for the tool’s original, so I’ll let him take it from here:

I soon realized that there was a clear opportunity to serve the Dark Lord by conceiving a plethora of unholy algorithms in service to one of the finest works ever created in his name. Simultaneously, I would be able to unleash a truly terrible pun to plague humankind. Now, the fruit of my labor is born. I bring forth DOOMBA, a half-goat, half-script creature, with native binary backing for the expensive parts, to be offered in place of my firstborn on this fine Christmas Eve.

Doomba is basically just a plug-in for Whitehouse’s own (far more useful) Noesis tool, which is used to convert between different model, image, and animation formats — for example, if you’re a game designer who needs to convert a model from one platform to another without redesigning things from scratch. Except in this case, it’s taking the image data from a Roomba and converting it (and by extension, the living room that the map is based on) into one of the unholy caverns of hell for you to slaughter endless demonic hordes in.

And while the tool is meant for Roomba maps (specifically, from the Roomba 980 that Whitehall owns), in theory you can throw in any image file, like the Mortal Kombat logo — although he notes in the blog that it might not work too well.

Is this useful? Not exactly, but it’s at least fun. For his part, Whitehall doesn’t seem too concerned. “Some will say that it’s pointless, but I have faith in my heart that the Dark Lord will wipe these people from the face of the earth and trap them in a dimension of eternal hellfire. Their suffering will be legendary.”