DoomPaint lets Microsoft Paint display the classic FPS

Doom now runs inside Microsoft Paint as a live display, with Azure CTO Mark Russinovich’s DoomPaint feeding each rendered frame to the clipboard and pasting it into Paint’s canvas, effectively turning the drawing app into a monitor for the original shareware version of Doom [1].

How DoomPaint works

Russinovich’s code runs the real Doom engine (via ViZDoom) on a separate thread, renders frames headlessly, and pushes each bitmap onto the Windows clipboard. Paint, kept as the active window, reads the clipboard and pastes the image as a genuine document edit, creating a new undo step for every frame. This design avoids the race condition that earlier attempts faced, where overwriting the clipboard before Paint finished reading caused errors; the final version publishes a single OLE data object and lets Paint signal when it can accept the next frame [1].

Gameplay quirks and performance

Because each frame is an edit, the usual Ctrl + Z shortcut rewinds the game, effectively “undoing” death. Saving the canvas at any moment produces a PNG screenshot, since Paint treats the frame as a drawn image. The engine runs at Doom’s native 35 Hz tic rate, but the displayed frame rate can be lower depending on how quickly Paint processes the paste operation. Resolutions range from the original 320 × 200 up to 640 × 480, with higher resolutions slowing the paste cadence [1][2].

Market and technical relevance

DoomPaint adds to a long list of unconventional platforms that can run Doom, from a single keyboard key to a Lego brick and even a micro‑chip of living neurons. While not a practical gaming platform, the project demonstrates the flexibility of Windows’ clipboard and UI automation APIs, and it highlights how AI‑focused tools like ViZDoom can be repurposed for creative demos. The open‑source MIT‑licensed repo also provides a ready‑made example for developers exploring headless rendering and unconventional display pipelines [3].

What to watch

• Updates to the GitHub repo that may improve paste reliability or add new resolution options.
• Community forks that integrate additional WADs or enhance audio handling.
• Potential use of the clipboard‑paste technique in other Windows‑based visualizations or AI research tools.

DoomPaint underscores that even legacy software can be reimagined with modern APIs, turning a simple drawing program into a functional game display and inviting further experimentation with unconventional UI pipelines.