I Played DOOM On An Abandoned Industrial Cake Machine

This is an abandoned dessert factory - in fact, its production lines ground to a halt after 10 years of churning out cream cakes and trifles way back in 2019 - and that’s when my new studio landlord started making enquiries about buying it, finally getting his hands on the keys a few weeks back.

Now, do excuse the quality of the footage - the power’s been off for years and there’s no natural daylight in here apart from up in the roof, the water’s also off, and consider yourself lucky that smellivision isn’t a thing, because a lot of these big metal tanks and other bits of machinery do still have a fair bit of rotten old dairy residue inside them.

Yeah…

You see, in its prime, this place was churning out thousands of sweet treats every day, with the help of some custom machinery that cost the owners literal millions - machinery that the new owner had been told had either been moved to other sites when this one was shut down, sold, or chopped up for scrap. Now, judging by the gaping holes in the ceilings where stuff’s been haphazardly hacked out, they have indeed taken some bits and pieces.

“That is quite a hole…”

But as you can see there’s an awful lot left, including a couple of the aforementioned cake machines and a lot of the high volume pumping infrastructure that originally kept them constantly fed with ingredients - not to mention glycol-based rapid cooling stuff, steam-based rapid heating stuff, and a whole load of IT infrastructure and factory automation stuff, like these PLCs.

Now, the new owner - my studio landlord no less - has no interest whatsoever in food production. He’s in the mail order soft craft business and desperately needs to fill this building with racking for his stock - similar to the one that my YouTube studio is in, and so, he’s had to hastily arrange the services of a demolition crew, who are starting to tear this place apart as we speak - and that’s where I come in, because, alongside IT guy Phil, we’ve been tasked with rescuing anything remotely useful or of value. Or indeed anything that we might be able to turn into a fun project.

Projects that will no doubt be utilising the services of this video’s sponsor PCBWay. For example, we could use their custom PCB fabrication service to design a control system for these light curtains, which were once used as safety devices to prevent people from sticking their body parts into the moving machinery. Or perhaps we could use PCBWay’s 3D printing, CNC machining, and sheet metal fabrication services to come up with a control panel for this rather snazzy traffic light that we liberated and have repurposed as a website status monitor.

…and no, we also have no idea why it plays music. Do you know what film this is from?

Anyway, if you have any electronics or fabrication projects in mind in the near future and need high quality, excellent customer service, competitive prices and a quick turnaround, why not check out the link to PCBWay.com down in the description of this video.

Back in the factory, we soon discovered that some of these machines still had touchscreen PCs attached to them - and that gave us an idea.

You see, I’m somewhat fond of a little game called DOOM, released by Id Software all the way back in 1993 - shoutout to the DOOM Shrine, my collection of DOOM releases and collectible paraphernalia. Of course, DOOM is a hugely influential game that should hopefully need no introduction - and if you know anything about the community around it, you’ll no doubt be aware that there’s a long-standing tradition of people running it on all sorts of interesting devices - some of which you can see documented on the Reddit community r/itrunsdoom and the website canitrundoom.org.

But as far as I can see, so far nobody has played DOOM on an industrial cake machine. So - as it’s right next door and the power’s off, let’s grab one of these PCs, bring it back to the studio, see if it still works, get it set up, and maybe make some history before the place gets demolished.

…and here it is, as promised, one of those PCs, this is one of two - and I will explain the other one and what’s going on with that in a second because that’s quite an interesting story - but first, let’s take a look around this one. So this is labelled “SUPERVISION-3” and it had the IP address of 10.0.0.13. From what we could see, everything inside the factory was networked - we also found some server cabinets, which unfortunately had had all of the servers removed bar one, which we’ve managed to get booted up, but it is not very happy at all. It looks like one of the CPUs has failed and it potentially has some other quite serious issues as well - so maybe there’ll be an update on that later on, I’m not quite sure, we’re still trying to work out what was on there.

But yeah, this is “SUPERVISION-3” as provided by Factory Systems, a French company. Just taking a look around the outside, this is actually a really interesting machine. It’s a “Boxer” branded machine, apparently. It has an audio connector - now from what we can see, this is a proprietary audio connector and we don’t actually have the breakout cable for this, although I have been probing some of the connections internally and I think we might be able to get audio out of this at a later date for a future project. I don’t have time to look at that properly at the moment.

We’ve got a TV out connector here, which looks like an S-video connector, but again, I haven’t had time to look at that. DVI, LVDS - this is used for driving certain types of flat panel displays, etc - and a couple of USB ports as well on the front, and of course the power switch, reset and the LEDs.

Now if we just take a look around the back - I’m calling this the back because I would assume that the power switch and the label would be on the front, but I’m not really sure. We have even more ports on here, so we have four, count them, four serial ports on the back. One of them was connected to that touchscreen panel and I’ve talked a bit about the enclosure that this was in in a second. But just to round out the ports here, we’ve got two more USB, we have LAN - so that’s a standard ethernet port that was also connected to something inside that enclosure. We have keyboard and mouse, that looks like PS/2, although I guess if you want to use a keyboard and mouse at the same time you need to use one of those splitters like we had back in the day on some systems, and standard VGA - and this, which is a DC input, let me just quickly check the voltage on the power supply - so this is the power supply that was hooked up to it. This says 19 volts output on there, 6.32 amps, and has this very interesting connector as well - and as we’ll see in a second, it also uses one of these connectors internally.

But there’s one more interesting thing to show to you before we take the lid off - and that is the bottom - so as you can see, we have a Windows XP Pro Embedded license - so this is running Windows XP Pro Embedded, which kind of dates these things. These are actually from 2009, we have discovered - and we can also see the model number and the specs on the bottom - and this is actually quite an interesting spec - so it’s a T5500 1.66 gigahertz, which is a Core 2 Duo. That’s a dual core system. It has 2GB of DDR2 667 RAM, and it has the “HDD Kit” installed as well - so that’s a 2.5 inch 40GB hard drive in there.

Now, I mentioned that I was going to talk a bit about the enclosure that these were in, because these are in these custom fabricated stainless steel enclosures - and they’re very interesting. These are actually hooked up to the pumping stations that were connected to the cream cake machines that I mentioned a moment ago - and inside these cabinets, there is a custom ventilation system, which actually uses a thermostat - and you can set the temperature on this and the fan will actually kick in at the correct temperature. We did get that hooked up a bit later on, as you’ll see in a moment in this video. Also, they were networked - so there was a DIN rail mounted ethernet switch in there, which was connected to the network port on these machines and then onwards to the rest of the building.

A really nice, clever, compact design, all self-contained - and there would have been one of these on each machine. I think we only found two that were actually fully intact - some of the others had been raided for various bits and pieces or were quite battered - so this was kind of the most complete one that we found.

Right, now let’s begin dismantling this - and I believe that it’s just these two long screws - there are a lot of screws on these.

But if we just remove those two on the bottom, this should come apart…

Aha!

…and as we can see on the bottom here, we have that 40 gigabyte hard drive that was mentioned - it’s a Fujitsu. Oh, this one’s actually 30 gigabytes. That’s interesting. It may have been replaced at some point - so, yeah, that’s a Fujitsu 30 gig hard drive. Of course, I can’t imagine there’s actually much software running on these - and then it’s just a few more screws to remove this top cover - and I spotted actually on the manufacturer’s website that you could spec these up with a CD-ROM drive as well if you wanted to - and obviously you could get a version that you could mount an optical drive and a 2.5 inch hard drive in as well - so that’s quite interesting.

Absolutely loads of screws in these things! This is nice, really kind of thick steel as well - these are really substantial machines - so quite well put together, quite well engineered - and that’s the top panel removed.

From what we can see, these actually have SATA connectors inside them, as well as the Parallel ATA - the IDE connectors that it uses for these hard drives - so evidently you could use it with more modern drives. That’s something I’m going to have to check at some point.

We also have, of course, we’ve got the BIOS battery there. We’ve got the RAM there, which is that DDR2 which was mentioned on that sticker - and also what looks like a CompactFlash slot - so perhaps in future, when I have a bit more time to play with this, it might be interesting to see if we can install something to CompactFlash maybe.

I mentioned that we had more than one of these machines, and this is the point where the next one comes into play, and for very good reason - so let me just fetch that from under the desk.

Because we’ve been playing with this in the office, and of course, we haven’t had much time at all to work out how these work - and actually completely tore this one down trying to get it to work. These both have the same error, or at least they both did have the same error that was coming up on the screen, which was an “out of range” error - and we discovered that no matter which monitor we hooked them up to, they came up with the exact same problem - so we decided to tear it down and see what we could see, found the CMOS- the BIOS reset jumper internally, and actually reset the BIOS on this one - and it all started working, which is really cool. But the trouble is, we couldn’t actually put it back together properly. There’s so many- there’s this tiny little cable inside here. There’s all these headers and things taking it apart, some of the pins got bent, and we couldn’t work out how to plug this back in. There’s also this heat pipe kind of cooling arrangement here - I’ve already loosened the screws on this - but this all needs to go back together in a very particular order for all of the various pieces to fit together properly and we haven’t quite worked it out yet, so I don’t want to strip this one down and risk breaking it and not having it go back together properly - so I’m going to use this one to demo what the internals look like - they are both identical.

So let’s continue. Hopefully that’s acceptable!

This is the motherboard part, I guess, or at least as we are choosing to identify it - and you’ll see there’s actually a second RAM socket on the back - this is laptop-style RAM, of course. From what I can see from the spec sheets and things on the website, it looks like you can only use one of these at a time but I’m not quite sure why there’s one on the back and one on the front, I guess it makes it a more kind of flexible design?

We’ve got one of those DC power connectors internally to power this part - and we have a socketed Intel Core 2 Duo CPU in there - so again, potential for upgrades, potential for a future project. I’m probably not going to do that in all honesty - I’m probably just going to keep all of these original because I have no idea what I’m going to do with these long term.

But yeah, we have this breakout board as well - and I’ll see how I can maneuver this out…

…again, there’s very good reason I’m using this second PC for demo purposes.

I’ll just get this out of the way - this is basically the breakout board with all of the ports and connectors and things on it: we’ve got our BIOS battery there - that is long dead, that’s just a 2032 - and on the back here, got some more chips and things and the various connectors - so yeah, a couple of things that we noticed: there is an unpopulated, what looks like a firewire connector on here? This is actually labeled “1394” - of course IEEE 1394 being firewire - and it has the correct number of pins, so perhaps there was an option to have firewire on this. We’ve also got - some of this is actually really well documented, some of the data sheets and things for these boards - we’ve got the pinouts for all of these kind of pin headers and things so that’s how we’ve managed to break into the audio connections on this, and we are potentially looking at adding proper audio output to these as well.

But that’s a look at the inside. As mentioned, we’re not quite sure how this is supposed to go back together. It is basically a fanless design so it uses this really cool heat pipe system. We’ve got this ancient thermal compound on here - and it essentially looks like this bottom board goes in first, then that goes in and clamps that down - and then this one supposedly plugs into the top of that. But you need very small fingers to be able to assemble these things!

Anyway, we’ll get this second demo unit out of the way - and what I want to do is reset the BIOS on this one, just clear the BIOS settings on this unit, which I believe we can actually do from the back here because we can look at this one - and the jumper that we need is jumper 6, which is behind the network port here - and if we can identify that from the back on this board we should be able to bridge that jumper without having to take this whole board out and risk breaking the PC - so let’s do that!

So it looks like, based on the other side of the board, that these two pins here are where that BIOS battery connects, and these are our reset jumpers - and you just need to briefly bridge this with the power off, and that should be enough to clear the BIOS settings.

Right, let’s get this hooked up to a screen, and I did grab one of the touch panels off of one of the other machines, so we’ll see if it works!

So, here is said touch screen panel, which of course you saw up and running in the office a moment ago, so we know that this one works.

“Supervision 2.1 Filling Line 1” - and just to go over those connections again: there’s a USB connector and serial as well, which was plugged into this port, COM4, and they both go to the touch panel. I’m not quite sure why it needs USB and serial for the touchscreen interface, but there you go. The ones I’ve seen in the past tend to use one or the other - and we just have a standard VGA connector as well - and finally, we have that power connector, that 19 volt DC input, which goes there. Those lights have just come on. That’s quite promising.

Everything else is still intact - so hopefully if I just press this switch for a second, this should power up…

“Out of range.” OK. Hmm…

Well, I thought this was going to be easy but it never is, is it? I thought I was cheating the system by using that second machine but nope, I’m going to have to take this one apart a bit - I think the issue is that I need to disconnect this existing battery before I try to clear the CMOS.

[Beep]

[Unhappy noises]

[A little longer than a few minutes later…]

So, current status: I could not for the life of me get this thing to boot up, so what I’ve done is swapped out the board from that other machine that I showed you a minute ago. No idea whether it works - so if it doesn’t, we may not have a video here. You may never actually get to see this.

Yeah, fingers crossed. Let’s just switch this power switch…

Light has come on, that’s promising…

Hard drive made a noise, that’s promising…

[Beep]

Beep. Oh yes, so the other board works - excellent! Now that is a massive relief!

Anyway right. Okay, so what have we got here just before we boot into Windows? Yes, as confirmed, we can confirm here we’ve got this Core 2 CPU here - Core 2 Duo 1.66 gigahertz. We’ve got the hard drive detected, the RAM detected, so that’s all good. Right, so I knew I’d need a keyboard for this, hence, I dug this one out. Just a bog standard USB keyboard. We’ll just plug that in there.

My goodness, I was on the edge of my seat for that one.

Let’s just get this booted up into Windows…

…and there we go, Windows XP - so I believe this is Windows XP Embedded based on the license sticker on the bottom.

Of course, another big issue with taking this apart is it uses these thermal pads between that heat pipe cooling system and the CPU and stuff - and of course, taking the board out does disturb those pads, so I would have quite like to have repasted it all as well, but I’m under so much time pressure here.

Anyway, we have, so this is InTouch, which is evidently - oh, yeah, the touchscreen works, that’s good - and we have “Accos IP” - APV Accos TCP/IP IO Server. Of course, this was all networked in the factory, obviously with the name “Supervision” I’m thinking these were for monitoring the status of the machines and perhaps resetting something maybe. I don’t think they were for real time control of the actual machines or data collection or anything like that - I think they were just purely monitoring those giant pumps and of course reporting that back to a central server. I think I can only speculate. I’m certainly not an expert on any of this. We’ve got VNC on here, which I think is quite standard - obviously, so the IT department in their office elsewhere in the building can access these screens and see what’s going on on them - and I guess it would have been someone’s job to kind of walk around and monitor these as well locally.

So I’ve been poking around for the past few minutes looking for a suitable Doom source port. I was going to put Chocolate Doom on here like I usually do but it turns out they stopped supporting 32-bit windows quite a while back so I’ve settled on Doom Retro - it’s the first time I’ve ever come across this but it looks like a nicely maintained source port, the latest release is from December last year so it’s nice and up to date, and I believe it started as a fork of Chocolate Doom. Maybe? I’m not sure, I’m going to have to go away and read up on this properly but it looks like it’s going to do the job - and I now have it downloaded onto this USB stick and of course this machine has USB so hopefully if I stick this into the slot…

“Found new hardware” - that’s good, of course it’s Windows XP so it’s reasonably modern…

…so we can drag this across, Doom Retro, shareware Doom IWAD…

…Doom WAD…

“WAD” of course famously standing for “Where’s All the Data?”

What’s this? Why won’t this go away?

I don’t know but it does seem to be working. OK, so if we go to “New Game”, “Knee Deep In The Dead”, “Ultra Violence” - and we can move around with the keyboard as expected but…

Ah ha! So the touch screen works! Although we can’t move backwards and forwards - and every time I touch the screen it fires. That’s not very useful is it? I’m going to run out of ammo fairly rapidly. Bear with me!

OK, so, apparently this has a console - so that’s quite cool. It’s not something I’ve seen in a DOOM source port before - and if we type the command “m_novertical”.

“Toggles no vertical movement of the mouse” - which is currently on. Which is what we want if we are playing with the mouse, of course there used to be a separate external utility that you could run. A TSR that would disable that-

Silence you.

…and we want this to be off I guess - so hopefully we should have vertical mouse movement now - and yes, there we go, now we can move backwards and forwards using the touch screen! Oh my God!

Got these guys up here. Can we shoot those?

Wonderful!

I’ve only got… Ahh I’ve used all my ammo!

I’ll punch him to death - and now we have a shotgun - and you can see how well that works on the touch screen. It’s quite… I mean it works. It’s playable. This touch screen is surprisingly responsive actually.

Oh! And we’ve run out of ammo again.

That seems like a successful experiment - to some degree?

So, all that’s left is to return the PC to its rightful place so it can fulfil its destiny. But we have a problem.

As mentioned earlier, the power’s off to this building and with everything in process of being torn apart, attempting to turn it back on would be very dangerous indeed. So, while I got the PC reconnected, Phil figured out the wiring, hacked off the original power cable, fitted a plug, and we got it plugged into this portable power station from a previous sponsored video.

“Oh my God!”

“That’ll be the fan.”

Yep, this is it: DOOM on an industrial cake machine. Now, please do forgive the quality of this footage - we were very short on time indeed and it seems the screen on this one was far more knackered than the one I was using previously in this video - not to mention the far less than optimal lighting.

[Horrible squeaky noises]

“Haha! It’s sticky…”

But we did it! I played through the first couple of levels on the touchscreen - with maybe a little bit of help from a USB keyboard we found lying around - and that was it. Yet another device that runs DOOM.

So thanks ever so much for joining me on this journey, if you enjoyed the video please do give it a thumbs up and perhaps consider subscribing for more of this particular brand of computing and gaming madness.

Big thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon, Ko-Fi, and my YouTube channel members who of course cover the costs of my studio and make these silly little projects possible. You’ll find the links to sign up down below where you’ll get behind the scenes coverage and early, sponsor-free access to my videos.

That’s all I have for now, so thanks again, and I’ll hopefully see you in the next one.

“Hehehehehe… Nice!”