With a new USB exploit, Doom is probably just the beginning for the Nintendo Alarmo.
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What do John Deere tractors, Ikea smart bulbs, Lego bricks, and the MacBook Pro Touch Bar have in common? They can all run Doom, and naturally, so can Nintendo’s adorable Alarmo alarm clock. It was only a matter of time before someone pulled that off, but what I didn’t expect was that when it happened, it would be playable.
That’s exactly what hacker GaryOberNicht, who recently figured out how to run custom firmware on the Alarmo, did in a video posted to Mastodon and their X account yesterday. In it, they play by turning or pressing the mushroom-shaped blob on top of the Alarmo to move and pressing the other buttons to shoot or open doors. Here, have a look:
Gary said it’s “possible to load the shareware version of Doom entirely from USB, without modifying the Alarmo.” And they’ve put the software and instructions for running it on Github, so almost any sufficiently knowledgeable and determined Alarmo owner can do it, too. Best of all, it can be done without opening the clock up at all.
How did they pull this off? Gary explains in a blog post that after another person called Spinda hacked the Alarmo (with a Flipper Zero) and dumped the firmware from memory, Gary worked out a method that uses a USB mode and the USB-C port to point the Alarmo to custom external firmware, instead.
Given how easy it appears to be reproduce what Gary has done, Alarmo software modding almost certainly won’t just stop at Doom. Of course, how far any online community efforts to turn the Alarmo into a bizarro game console will get probably depends on how Nintendo, which has been particularly active with its copyright disputes lately, feels about it.
