KiDoom turns a PCB editor into an unconventional DOOM display: copper tracks draw the walls, while component footprints stand in for enemies and pickups. The game does not run inside KiCad. Its engine runs separately, and KiCad renders the geometry it receives.
What “trace routing” has to do with DOOM
The title is a PCB-design pun. In Nick Bild’s Hackster article, the idea is framed with two questions: what if DOOM’s walls were actual PCB traces, and what if enemies and health packs were component packages? Michael Ayles’s KiDoom project turns that conceit into a software demonstration.
In the PCB Editor view, copper tracks represent walls. Footprints mark objects in the scene: Ayles uses QFP-64 footprints for enemies, SOIC-8 footprints for decorations, and SOT-23 footprints for collectibles. These package assignments are visual choices made for KiDoom, not recommended PCB-design conventions.
How KiDoom draws the scene
The game engine runs outside KiCad
DOOM is not executing as a KiCad plugin. Ayles describes the engine as a separate C process that sends vectors over a socket; KiCad is the display renderer. The project extracts wall and sprite geometry from DOOM’s drawsegs[] and vissprites[] arrays, serializes that geometry as JSON over a Unix socket, and uses Python to update PCB objects in place. Ayles summarizes the division of labor this way: “KiCad is only the display renderer. The actual DOOM engine runs as a separate C process, sending vectors over a socket.” (Ayles’s KiDoom project write-up.)
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Three ways to view it
The project describes three views: an SDL gameplay window, a Python wireframe renderer for reference and debugging, and the KiCad PCB view used for the demonstration. KiCad is therefore one rendering option in a pipeline, rather than the place where the game logic lives.
Why use vectors instead of pixels?
Ayles says his initial pixel-by-pixel concept managed approximately 0.15 FPS. Rather than represent a screen as tens of thousands of pixel-sized pads, the vector approach draws the scene as roughly 100–300 line segments per frame. In his 2025 project write-up, he reports approximately 10–25 FPS for vector rendering, depending on hardware. These are figures reported by the project author, not independently verified benchmarks.
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The reported per-machine figures also vary: 8–15 FPS on an older i5 with integrated graphics, 15–25 FPS on an M1 MacBook Pro, and 18–28 FPS on an i7 with RTX 3050 Ti. Ayles does not specify all test conditions, so these numbers should not be treated as results from a controlled comparison.
What limits performance—and what it looks like
Ayles identifies KiCad’s pcbnew.Refresh() call as the bottleneck. He lists turning off the grid, ratsnest, antialiasing, and clearance outlines as ways to reduce overhead. The result remains a wireframe visualization rather than a textured game, and the project is not presented as smooth 60-FPS gameplay.
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The trade-off is clear: vector segments avoid the enormous object count implied by pixel-by-pixel drawing, but KiCad’s refresh behavior still constrains how quickly the rendered PCB view updates.
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Ayles’s project page describes building DOOM with the supplied script, trying the standalone renderer, installing a KiCad plugin, and launching it from PCB Editor’s External Plugins menu. Those are the author’s described steps, not independently verified installation instructions. The available project information here does not establish current repository availability, supported KiCad versions, or whether the setup works on a particular machine.
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KiDoom is best understood as a technical demonstration of an unusual rendering pipeline, not a practical PCB-design workflow. Its point is the visual conceit and the engineering needed to map game geometry onto PCB objects—not a new way to design boards or a reason to buy particular hardware.
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