Azure CTO pastes Doom into Paint one frame at a time
Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich has built a playful side project that displays the classic video game Doom inside Microsoft Paint, using the Windows clipboard to pass images between the two. The project, nicknamed "MS Paint Doom" or "DoomPaint", underscores that Paint itself performs no computation whatsoever, merely acting as a canvas onto which each frame is pasted, which Russinovich says is the entire joke of the exercise.
Technically, the ViZDoom engine runs the game headlessly and outputs each frame as a Device Independent Bitmap, which is copied via the clipboard and pasted onto Paint's canvas, while a low-level keyboard hook captures player input and the game engine supplies sound. Russinovich, who wrote the code with help from Anthropic's Claude, said the framerate was far from smooth but that the setup worked, including audio. The stunt follows a wider trend of running Doom on unlikely platforms, such as PCB design software and Sega 32X hardware, and differs from earlier Paint-based efforts that merely mirrored a separate display rather than piping frames directly through the clipboard.
In short
- Azure CTO made Doom playable via Microsoft Paint using the clipboard
- Paint only displays pasted frames; it computes nothing itself
- Built with help from Claude as a "frivolous" side project
Explained simply
Doom is a 1993 first-person shooter, a game in which the player moves through a three-dimensional setting and fights enemies. It became famous for running on a wide range of computers and devices, inspiring people to find unusual ways to display or play it.
Microsoft Paint is a basic Windows drawing programme, while Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing service. Mark Russinovich is a senior Microsoft technology executive; in this project, Paint serves as the place where game images appear, while other software runs the game and handles player input and sound.
The project is part of a long-running tradition of experimenting with Doom on unexpected hardware and software. It matters mainly as a playful demonstration of how different computer tools can be connected, rather than as a practical way to play the game.