Can It Run Doom? AWS S3 Edition

Can you run Doom on AWS S3? Sort of, if you tweak it to ‘Can you run Doom from AWS S3′.

I’ve been trying out options for mounting S3 buckets locally to revive an old project that needs a bit of cloud storage but wasn’t written for S3. I’ve mucked about with s3fs, but the performance wasn’t great. I’m giving cunoFS a shot (as my usage comes in under their free tier) and they tout their performance over everything else (including the AWS CLI and EFS).

The test: Run Doom from S3 to prove compatibility. Both the binary and the WAD file containing the Doom level data should be stored in S3 and run directly from there.

Did it work? Yes – and it even worked using S3 URIs rather than file paths which is pretty neat. Given that this Doom port wasn’t written with this S3 filesystem layer in mind, I’m hoping my old code will work as well, once I’ve cleaned it up.

If nothing else, this was a fun distraction, made for a cool screenshot.