A Roomba is an autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner that, guided by various sensors, will slowly prowl your room of choice, keeping your carpet clean without knocking everything over. Thanks to the efforts of coder Rich Whitehouse, it is also now an automated Doom map-making machine: The DOOMBA. 

Doomba is actually a script for Whitehouse's Noesis software, a tool for "previewing and converting between hundreds of model, image, and animation formats". The script tracks and stores your Roomba's movement data via the Clean Map reporting system, which can be imported into Noesis and then into a randomized Doom map. 

"I discovered that the newer Roombas are making use of a pretty respectable SLAM [simultaneous localization and mapping] implementation, which led to wondering about what kind of data I could get out of it and what I could do with that data," Whitehouse explained on his website.

"I soon realized that there was a clear opportunity to serve the Dark Lord by conceiving a plethora of unholy algorithms in service to one of the finest works ever created in his name. Simultaneously, I would be able to unleash a truly terrible pun to plague humankind. Now, the fruit of my labor is born." 

Doomba has only been tested with a Roomba 980 so there's no guarantee that it will work with other models, and some assembly is required: You'll need to install the latest Noesis software, copy over the Doomba script, and then manually set up the Roomba's IP and credentials. After creating the .noeroomba file—the raw movement data—you'll have to pull it all together in the Noesis application, and then tweak it up as you see fit. 

That's the part where things can go really wrong, as Whitehouse warned that he hasn't tested it extensively and "didn't really bother sanity-checking values on the engine side". Doomba won't stop you from trying to do things that Doom itself can't handle, in other words, so it's easy to cause errors like the Visplane overflow if you start fiddling with things you don't understand. 

But like a lot of DIY PC gaming exotica, practicality isn't really the point. "I hope you get some fun out of this feature. I definitely have!" Whitehouse wrote. "Some will say that it's pointless, but I have faith in my heart that the Dark Lord will wipe these people from the face of the earth and trap them in a dimension of eternal hellfire. Their suffering will be legendary."

Doom co-creator John Romero is set to release a new megawad this February, in the form of a fifth episode of the original game. Dubbed Sigil, it features nine levels and even has a fancy physical limited edition, though if you're keen on just playing the levels you can do so for free providing you own a copy of Doom.

But waiting until February is hard. Thankfully Romero has spent the last week streaming two levels from the megawad, culminating in around four hours of footage. That's a lot of hours for two levels, but Romero demonstrates small iterative changes made to the levels over the course of the week, and also talks through some of the design decisions. He also dies: these levels aren't going to be a walk in the park.

Here's the first video. I won't embed them all – if you want to watch the rest in the series, head over to Romero's Twitch channel.

Doom—the 1993 version—is one of those classic games that have aged astonishingly well. If you compare its art style to, say, Duke Nukem 3D or Goldeneye, it still looks much better. 

But lately, modders and enthusiasts have been experimenting with neural network upscaling technology to bring the game's sprites and textures into the 21st century. Thanks to Doomworld user hidfan a wad file is now available featuring upscaled graphics straight from the maw of AI—specifically, Hidfan used Nvidia's GameWorks SuperResolution and letsenchance.io. 

Veeery generally speaking, hidfan fed upsized versions of the textures into these neural networks, retrieved the results, and then downsized them again in order to make them work within the game. It's not all achieved by the network, though: a fair bit of touching up needed to be done in order for things to not look weird.

"Unfortunately [the process] comes with some unwanted pixels here and there and a heavy de-noising work was needed," hidfan writes. "Also the contrast is changed, bright details are brighter, and dark one are darker too, this had to be cleaned as well by removing them and letting the original texture color appear."

Here's how some of the wall textures stand up after the upscale. You can get the wad here.

If you’re looking to observe this special Doomversary—a whole 25 years—you should check out 2018’s Cacowards. Doomworld shines a spotlight on the best Doom maps and mods every year on the game's anniversary, and you’ll find plenty of great WADs in the list this year.

Browsing the top ten, the mods are often worlds apart in tone, art and systems. Maskim Xul, for instance, sees you exploring a haunted, eldritch mansion, while The Golden Souls 2 looks more like Mario 64 than Doom. They’re an eclectic bunch. 

If you fancy some fast-paced multiplayer, Quake Champions: Doom Edition, which won the multiplayer award, might be more up your street. It's exactly what it sounds like: Quake Champions made in Doom. 

Some of these are beefy megawads, much like John Romero’s upcoming Sigil. Struggle—Antaresian Legacy has a whopping 33 maps, for instance, some of which will take 30 minutes or more to get through. It’s not a quick jaunt through Hell. 

Andi Hamilton explored the Doom mod scene way back in 2015, which we've republished for the 25th anniversary.

Sigil, John Romero’s new Doom mod, will be free when it launches in February, but you can also buy yourself a limited edition box containing plenty of extras. Inside the Beast Box, you’ll find some art, a coin, some stickers and a pewter replica of John Romero’s head on a spike. Yes, just conventional collector's edition stuff. 

Beast Box sales are limited to two purchases per customer, so you can't fill your whole house with Romero. This isn’t the first time Romero’s head has been impaled on a spike, either. It’s an Easter egg in Doom 2. 

Romero has a colourful history when it comes to marketing games. The long-awaited and ultimately terrible Daikatana was promoted by a full-page ad that claimed “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch”. He now has regrets. 

You’ll need to shell out $166 for the privilege of owning Romero’s gross decapitated head, and there’s a limited 2-week pre-order that closes on December 24. There’s also a standard box for $39.99 that contains two stickers, a floppy disk-style USB and a case.