Hackers Achieve The Inevitable: They Got Nintendo’s Alarmo To Play Doom
The Nintendo Alarmo is nothing more than a 2.8-inch circular screen housed in a big, red, circular computer. That immediately made it a prime target for hardware hackers keen on getting the $100 alarm clock to do their bidding. The first step on this path is, inevitably, forcing the device to run Doom. Unfortunately, it doesn’t try to wake up your neighbors every time you slay a demon, at least not yet.
Reverse engineering specialist and YouTuber GaryOderNichts has a video of the Nintendo Alarmo running Doom natively, with no hardware replacement involved. Gary posted a video to his YouTube and Twitter accounts over the weekend showing this in action. The controls use the spinning wheel on the top of Alarmo to aim and move, and the two side buttons let you fire your weapons. The hardware hacker laid out the instructions and code on their GitHub for anybody else who wants to achieve the same feat.
There is no audio, as Gary explained he encountered some “USB loader memory size restrictions.” It’s possible to get sound if you load Doom fully from USB without modifying Alarmo, but that would detract from the spectacle. In this case, Alarmo is running a version of Chocolate Doom, an easily portable version of the 1993 classic shooter.
Hackers have been digging into Alarmo since its release in October. Gary cited a fellow hardware hacker and Twitter user, Spinda, who was one of the first to do a teardown and show how one could attach external devices like the Flipper Zero to the Alarmo’s board to start rooting through its internal memory.
Nintendo Alarmo teardown. Contains:
– STM32H730ZBI6 ARM MCU
– NXP 88W8801-NMD2 Wi-Fi SoC
– THGBMTG5D1LBAIL 4GB eMMC storage
– SC1233A 24GHz radar sensor
Unfortunately I tore the LCD ribbon cable ???? pic.twitter.com/6hjkgAYfd9— Spinda ????????????️????????️⚧️ (@_spinda) October 12, 2024
Gary has been working on reverse engineering Alarmo over the past few weeks. On their Blog, the hacker described the process of soldering some wires connected to the SWD pins on a Raspberry Pi to read the board’s registers. The Alarmo uses an STM32H7 MCU, which Gary said was a big boon since there’s plenty of example code available for free online.
The long and short of it is that Gary managed to bypass the locks on the device and get a USB mode and the device’s singular USB-C port to run a custom firmware update. This means you can run any custom code on the device without needing to open it up. It still works on the current software version 2.0.
Gary also showed the alarm clock displaying an image of a cat, but you can run animations as well. You can port any such visuals you want to it, like a lava lamp effect. However, none of this necessarily allows you to hack the Nintendo Alarmo’s base software for some heretical uses, such as letting God of War’s Kratos yell at you to “wake up, boy” every morning. Nintendo may take the opportunity to update the system to prevent any more shenanigans. For now, this is merely the tip of the iceberg for what is technically possible.
It may not be the Switch 2, but the Alarmo is proving a fine distraction until we eventually see Nintendo’s sequel console in action next year.
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