If you were holding off on buying a Pre until it had some great games, start warming up that credit card. We knew homebrewers were already at work and one of those, a bloke who goes by the name Sargun, has managed to get the iconic Doom running on the phone -- or the open-source PRDoom, anyway, which is close enough for us. Sargun re-built the game to use the DirectFB graphics library to pipe all the two-barreled action to the Pre's framebuffer, and said getting the whole thing up and running was "actually fairly trivial." Your mileage may vary depending on your compiler skills, but with any luck someone will host up some binaries to save us all the trouble. Video proof of this great achievement after the break.

Okay, so first things first -- we all know the world's on track to end in 2012, so it's not like this really matters. But if, just if it manages to survive (à la Y2K), you can pretty much bank on a mass reversal of culture as we all push aside our netbooks and return to the playground. According to some "research" slated to be fully published "later this year," PCs and laptops are apt to "operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an unreliable toy" from 2012 onward. The reason? Massive growth in internet demand, which is undoubtedly on pace to crush existing infrastructure that can't ever be improved upon by anyone, regardless of their market capitalization or determination to expand. It's noted that the internet itself will somehow survive, but that users will begin to see "brownouts," which are described as "a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed." Thank heavens for FinallyFast, right?

Psst... the solution to all of this is just past the break.

[Thanks, Colin]

Considering that Doom runs smooth as butter on Nokia's 770, the OLPC XO, and the iPod, you knew it was only a matter of time before this classic made its way over to the iPhone. Just in time for the weekend, Doom is now available for Apple's first handset. And just in case blasting through pixelated fiends wears you out, why not check out the new and improved NES emulator? We won't waste anymore of your precious iPhone gaming time here, now get your downloads on below!

Update: So you can't exactly -- what's the word we're looking for -- "play" Doom quite yet, it seems the controller ain't working. It's a promising sign, though!

Read - id Software Doom on iPhone
Read - iPhone NES v0.20.1 + Games

If f00 f00's NES-enhanced iPod has left you seriously reconsidering your choice of portable Doom controls, you can now do more than just stare at your iPod's suddenly inadequate click wheel, with f00 f00 following up his tantalizing video with a full step-by-step guide for bridging your own iPod/NES divide. As with most hacks involving a soldering gun, however, it's not exactly for the faint of heart or those concerned with warranties. That said, as far as NES-related hacks go, this one looks to be relatively straightforward, requiring just a few readily available parts and the requisite amount of skill and patience. As it turns out, however, the controller doesn't actually function as a dock, although f00 f00 says that would be a relatively easy modification to make.

[Thanks, Matt N]

If you think we took that indubitably unscientific "decibel test" with a grain of salt, then we're throwing down a few barrels with this one, but the sheer weirdness of this should encourage all bricked Xbox 360 owners to give it a whirl. Although we're fully aware of how wrapping a soft cotton towel around your red ring-displaying console should not effect its status, well, it just might. According to numerous 360 owners who haven't taken advantage of Microsoft's newly-extended repair / replacement offer, they were able to bring a few previously dead Xbox 360s back to life, if only for a few hours at a time. Sure, this is far from an actual solution, and if anything, this should reaffirm that voice in your head telling you to call up Microsoft and get an RMA number, but nonetheless, it seems that blanketing your 360 with a towel, firing it up for 10 minutes or so, turning it off, and then removing the towel will mysteriously allow your machine to function for a couple hours. Granted, we don't know how many of these folks are fibbing, but we're putting it to you all to give this a go and report back, and if it does indeed work out, who knows what else those innocent looking towels can revive? [Warning: Read link requires subscription]

[Via TheXboxDomain]

What has yours done today? Yeah, maybe you've fiddled around with Linux on your 'Pod, or even got that version of Doom up and running way back when, but you've just got nothing on this hack by f00 f00, which turns an old NES controller into an iPod dock and provides some of the best Doom controls we've seen yet. Yeah, we're jealous too. No word on exactly how f00 f00 pulled this off, but it's not like we'd be able to follow along anyways. Peep the action vid after the break.

[Via Hack-A-Day]

What good is another bonafide learning tool without a dash of fun beneath the hood? While OLPC XOs have just recently started rolling off production lines (and heading to eBay, most likely), it seems a few folks with a thing for 1992 have put the long-awaited machine to its best use yet. While Quanta Computer is slated to start a "test production" of these gizmos any day now, these bandits tested out its compatibility with a retro classic by installing (and successfully playing) the original Doom. Although this title has been the focal point of quite a few ports throughout the years, we'd say this rendition is definitely vying for king of them all, so be sure to continue on for the YouTube presentation.

Japan, which once topped the list of world's fastest supercomputers with NEC's Earth Simulator, has seen its position deteriorate in recent years in the face of faster machines like IBM's 280-teraflop BlueGene/L. Well now it looks like a new Japanese rig is poised to regain the top of the charts, and the most amazing thing about Riken's MDGrape-3 -- besides its claimed 1 petaflop performance -- is the fact that it cost only $9 million to build, giving it a per-gigaflop pricetag of just $15 (compared to the $140/gigaflop cost of IBM's top dog). Developed in conjunction with Hitachi, Intel, and NEC subsidiary SGI Japan, MDGrape-3 is being tasked with helping the pharmaceutical industry model new drugs, as it can calculate the chemical bonding properties of a proposed drug-protein combo in mere seconds. While BlueGene/L contains a whopping 130,000 processors distributed over 65,000 nodes, Riken's closet-sized machine needs only 4,808 chips to achieve four times its speed for certain applications. Oh, and despite the impressive-sounding performance, due to the specialized nature of its design, its unlikely that you'll see MDGrape-3 rocking a game of Doom anytime soon.

[Via Slashdot]