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.