The new Apple Macbook is not exactly setting the tech world alight and impressing anyone with its set of features, including a new touchbar. Reviewers at ZDNet even declared it as “just not that useful”, interesting at best but hardly productivity enhancing in any sense. Normally, that is enough to put most users off from buying the device, but this is Apple after all with its own fan base that will easily shell out $2500 for something that has a new feature that is not that useful as long as it’s new.
More creative types (with disposable income) are having fun with the new feature however, as the touchbar itself is a stand-alone computer. It is essentially an Apple Smart Watch embedded on the new Macbook. Adam Bell, an iOS developer based out of Canada has managed to run the classic DOOM on the tiny touchbar area. The classic DOOM has become a benchmark of sorts for anything hackable, originally requiring 8MB of RAM and a 486 processor or a 66MHz Pentium/Athlon equivalent when it was released in 1993. There is actually an entire community of users dedicated to showing off what can run DOOM, including classic NES systems and other unlikely hardware at http://itrunsdoom.tumblr.com/
It runs on the new Macbook but it is not exactly playable since the touchbar resolution is 1085 x 30, and although it is a retina display with a P3 wide color space, it is not enough to render the game in playable pixel blasting glory. It is enough to display the iconic heads-up display though, and it looks quite good. Now if only it was hacked so that the HUD is at the touchbar and the game is happening on the main screen which would be more exciting.
