You think your gaming rig is impressive? Not anymore. Meet Ryan Edgar, a 19-year-old who has the wonderful honor of playing Doom...on a McDonalds register.




The key question with any piece of technology is, of course, whether it can run Doom. Edgar had the chance to answer this question recently after visiting a local McDonald’s. The store was in the process of replacing their antiquated cash registers, and because McDonald’s aren’t actually in the business of selling point-of-sale computers that are still running Windows XP, Edgar was able to take an old register home.


Talking to Kotaku Australia over DM, Edgar explained that he got Doom going by copying ZDOOM onto a USB. “[I] downloaded ZDOOM (Doom XP) on it using my personal computer, plugged it into the USB in the cash register and ran it through there with auto run,” Edgar said.

Using a USB splitter, Edgar was able to get a mouse and keyboard working, the result of which you can see below.

“I was able to run explorer.exe by doing CTRL ALT DEL to get to Task Manager but there was some weird encryption on it,” he said. He wasn’t sure about the precise specs of the terminal, although its been previously reported that McDonald’ s built their own point-of-sale software called PC POS. The original version was built for MS-DOS, but an updated version (New-POS) was released for Windows XP Pro.

A shot of McDonald’s older DOS-based point-of-sale software running on a Panasonic terminal, very similar to the one Edgar used to get DOOM running on.

I asked Edgar what he planned on doing with the terminal now that he’d gotten Doom working. “I might even just use it as my second computer,” he suggested, adding that he’ll try and get Sonic Adventure 2 working on it before too long.


So McDonald’ s registers can run games. What else could they run, I wonder?

This story was originally published on Kotaku Australia.