Someone managed to install Doom on an exercise machine, and the best part is, you have to sweat to play

It's no secret that Doom has managed to find its way onto all kinds of screens and devices around the world. In fact, there's an entire community based around installing Doom on as many things as possible, and it's always fun to see what gadget gets converted into a makeshift gaming system next.

Well, it turns out that the latest victim of the Doom craze is the Life Fitness SE3 Elliptical, an exercise bike with a screen that was previously very much devoid of cool retro FPS games. Now, someone has figured out a way to get Doom on it, and you can follow along at home on your own elliptical if you have one. Just be warned, you must exercise to keep the game running.

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Getting Doom running on an elliptical may finally make me go to the gym

This cool feat was detailed in a post on the ItRunsDoom subreddit, which documents people getting Doom running on things that really shouldn't be running Doom. This time, tinkerer grubbyplaya shared their recent project of getting Doom running on a Life Fitness SE3 Elliptical.

To achieve this, grubbyplaya noted that these machines run Android 5, so they wanted to use an Android Debug Bridge (ADB) to install Freedoom on them. Unfortunately, this proved to be really buggy, so they abandoned this idea.

While on the hunt for a different way to get Doom running on an exercise bike, they eventually found an official download repertoire of Life Fitness menus. These were meant to be for manual updates over a USB drive, but grubbyplaya realised you can mess with these files to add Doom to them, then have it installed onto the elliptical via a USB update. Sure enough, after devising their own custom Doom-filled update, they managed to sneak the game into the Life Fitness menu.

Funnily enough, one of the flaws that grubbyplaya listed is, in my opinion, one of its best features:

There are a couple of problems with playing this way, and they're mainly the fault of LF. These devices time out if you stay still for more than 10 seconds, so it's hard to take a steady picture and even more difficult to take a coherent video, since you have to be exercising while recording it. There's no multitouch, so shooting and moving at the same time isn't possible, and since tapping at the bottom of the screen opens up the workout UI, it's really easy to accidentally mess with the workout while DOOMing.

Yes, that's right. You have to keep pedalling, or else the entire device will go into standby mode. Maybe someone should find a way to tie PC or console power to an elliptical; I can guarantee that it'd get people very fit as they try to keep their device powered during a ranked match.