As literally everything ought to be able to play DOOM in some fashion, [Adam Rice] recently set out to make the venerable DNS finally play the game after far too many decades of being DOOM-less. You may be wondering how video games and a boring domain records database relate to each other. This is where DNS TXT records come into play, which are essentially fields for arbitrary data with no requirements or limitations on this payload, other than a 2,000 character limit.

Add to this the concept of DNS zones which can contain thousands of records and the inkling of a plan begins to form. Essentially the entire game (in C#) is fetched from TXT records, loaded into memory and run from there. This is in some ways a benign form of how DNS TXT records can be abused by people with less harmless intentions, though [Adam] admits to using the Claude chatbot to help with the code, so YMMV.

The engine and WAD file with the game’s resources are compressed to fit into 1.7 MB along with a 1.2 MB DLL bundle, requiring 1,966 TXT records in Base64 encoding on a Cloudflare Pro DNS zone. With a free Cloudflare account you’d need to split it across multiple zones. With the TXT records synced across the globe, every DNS server in the world now has a copy of DOOM on it, for better or worse.

You can find the project source on GitHub if you want to give this a shake yourself.

Thanks to [MrRTFM] for the tip.

hackaday.com/2026/03/31/the-d-…

When you think of iconic parings, your brain probably goes more to “cookies and milk” than “DEC and Ikea” but after watching [Dave]’s latest on Usagi Electric where he puts a PDP-11 into an Ikea desk, you may rethink that.

The PDP-11 is vintage hardware that actually lived inside of a different desk, once upon a time, serving as the control unit for an FTIR spectrometer. While the lab equipment has thankfully survived the decades, the desk did not and when [Dave] got the unit it was as a pile of parts. He revived it, of course– it’s kind of what he does– but it didn’t get a new desk for years, until his latest shop re-organization.

The one concession to modernity– and missing parts– is using switching power supplies rather than the bulky linear PSU that would have originally powered the unit. It’s a good thing, too, or we have trouble picturing how everything would fit! This particular PDP-11 comes with the high performance vector processing unit in order to crunch those spectrographs, and apparently those chips idle at about 60C, so the desk-case got some decent-sized 120V fans to keep everything cool and running for years to come.

This isn’t the most aesthetic or fanciest case-mod we’ve seen, mostly being made of surplus plywood and scrap metal fittings, but it certainly gets the job done. Given that the PDP-11 has been crammed into every form-factor known to man, from a system-on-a-chip (before anybody really talked about SOCs) to desktop workstations, and of course the hulking cabinets with their iconic blinkenlights-– it’s hard to say that this installation isn’t reasonably authentic, even if it isn’t the original desk.

youtube.com/embed/mG3XGbbvWH8?…

hackaday.com/2026/03/30/pdp-11…

Have you ever wanted to see the computers behind the first (and for now only) man-made objects to leave the heliosphere? [Gary Friedman] shows us, with an archived tour of JPL building 230 in the ’80s.

A NASA employee picks up a camcorder and decides to record a tour of the place “before they replace it all with mainframes”. They show us computers that would seem prehistoric compared to anything modern; early Univac and IBM machines whose power is outmatched today by even an ESP32, yet made the Voyager program possible all the way back in 1977. There are countless peripherals to see, from punch card writers to Univac debug panels where you can see the registers, and from impressive cabinets full of computing hardware to the zip-tied hacks “attaching” a small box they call the “NIU”, dangling off the inner wall of the cabinet. And don’t forget the tape drives that are as tall as a refrigerator!

We could go on ad nauseum, nerding out about the computing history, but why don’t you see it for yourself in the video after the break?

youtube.com/embed/T_bqc76_3xU?…

Thanks to [Michael] for the tip!

hackaday.com/2026/03/30/see-th…

We haven’t seen an instrument panel quite like [bluesyann]’s, which was made by curing UV resin directly onto plywood with the help of a 3D printer and a bit of software work. The result is faintly-raised linework that also makes hand drilling holes both cleaner and more accurate.

The process begins by designing the 2D layout in Inkscape, which has the advantage of letting one work in 1:1 dimensions. A 10 mm diameter circle will print as 10 mm; a nice advantage when designing for physical components. After making the layout one uses OpenSCAD to import the .svg and turn it into a 3D model that’s 0.5 mm tall. That 3D model gets loaded into the resin printer, and the goal is to put it directly onto a sheet of plywood.
A little donut shape makes a drill centering feature, and the surrounding ring keeps the edges of the hole clean.
To do that, [bluesyann] sticks the plywood directly onto the 3D printer’s build platform with double-sided tape. With the plywood taking the place of the usual build surface, the printer can cure resin directly onto its surface. Cleanup still involves washing uncured resin off the board, but it’s nothing a soak in isopropyl alcohol and an old toothbrush can’t take care of.

[bluesyann] has a few tips for getting the best results, and one of our favorites is a way to make drilling holes easier and cleaner. Marking the center of a drill hit with a small donut-shaped feature makes a fantastic centering guide, making hand drilling much more accurate. And adding a thick ring around the drill hole ensures clean edges with no stray wood fibers, so no post-drilling cleanup required. Don’t want the ring to stick around after drilling? Just peel it off. There’s a load of other tips too, so be sure to check it out.

A nice front panel really does make a project better, and we’ve seen many different approaches over the years. One can stick laminated artwork onto an enclosure, or one can perform toner transfer onto 3D printed surfaces by putting the design on top of the 3D printer’s build surface, and letting the heat of molten plastic do the work of transferring the toner. And if one should like the idea of a plywood front panel but balk at resin printing onto it, old-fashioned toner transfer works great on wood.

hackaday.com/2026/03/30/this-f…