Doom Runs From DNS: Shareware Game Rebuilt From Nearly 2,000 TXT Records

Overview

• Adam Rice’s “Doom Over DNS” encodes the shareware game into roughly 1,964 to 1,966 Base64 TXT records and reconstructs it entirely in memory.
• A short PowerShell script queries public DNS, stitches the chunks, loads the assemblies in RAM, and starts the game without writing to disk in about 10 to 20 seconds.
• The payload compresses the engine and WAD to about 1.7 to 1.9 MB plus a 1.2 MB DLL bundle so it fits within a single Cloudflare Pro DNS zone.
• The port builds on Nobuaki Tanak’s C# Managed Doom, with Claude-assisted code changes that let the game run from a memory stream instead of files.
• The project highlights that DNS TXT records accept arbitrary text of around 2,000 characters per record, turning a name‑lookup system into an unintended way to move and mirror files, with source code now on GitHub.