Azure CTO pastes Doom into Paint one frame at a time

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich has taken a break from the cloud to turn Paint into a monitor for Doom, using the Windows clipboard as plumbing. Dubbed "MS Paint Doom" or "DoomPaint" – either will work – the project is the product of a spare-time experiment. To be clear, Microsoft Paint isn't doing anything other than serving as a place to paste from the game. As Russinovich observed: "Paint renders the game but does not compute it. Paint computes nothing. Paint has never computed anything. That's the joke." The result is as enjoyable as it is pointless. Doom still runs in the background and, on the PC we tried, the framerate was hardly fluid. The important thing was that it worked. There was even sound. ViZDoom runs the Doom .wad file and renders it headlessly. Each frame is passed through the Windows clipboard and pasted onto Paint's canvas. A low-level keyboard hook captures and swallows game inputs while Paint is in the foreground, and sound effects come from the game engine. A glance at the code shows Russinovich was more than happy to use Claude to whip it up. In a LinkedIn post, he said: "I've been using Fable 5 on serious research projects and find it a noticeable improvement over Opus 4.8." Using Microsoft Paint as a display for Doom is not, however, a serious research project, as Russinovich acknowledged. "I've also been having fun with it on frivolous ones," he added, so here we are. Russinovich noted that this was not Paint's first appearance in the world of "Can it run Doom?" However, earlier efforts rendered the game in a separate display and mirrored it into Paint. His version sends every frame through the Windows clipboard as a Device Independent Bitmap (DIB) and onto the canvas. Vibe-coding and the "Can it run Doom?" challenge were bound to meet. In 2025, Claude assisted an effort to use KiCad PCB design software to render Doom in vectors. Now Russinovich has enlisted it to turn Paint into a display. Azure may present its CTO with more pressing matters, but few will be as gloriously silly. ®