Mark Russinovich's DoomPaint runs classic game inside Microsoft Paint

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich created DoomPaint, a novel port that displays the classic first‑person shooter Doom inside Microsoft Paint. The game engine runs in the background via ViZDoom, rendering each frame, copying it to the Windows clipboard as a bitmap, and automatically pasting it into Paint. Keyboard input is captured so the player can control Doom while Paint remains the active window. The project uses the original DOOM1.WAD shareware file and, for missing maps, BSD‑licensed Freedoom assets. To avoid clipboard conflicts, Russinovich publishes a single OLE object that updates only the image data, letting Paint signal when it has finished reading a frame. The display runs at up to 35 fps, with resolutions from the original 320×200 up to 640×400. DoomPaint demonstrates an AI‑assisted approach to fitting a full game engine into an unexpected visual container.