A Microsoft executive got Doom running in Paint using a clipboard hack

Published Aug 4, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary Azure CTO Mark Russinovich got the original Doom running in MS Paint with an OLE clipboard hack. Every frame is pasted into Paint as a genuine document edit. Paint only displays frames while the engine does the compute. If you thought Microsoft's Azure CTO should have better things to do than getting classic FPS Doom to run in MS Paint, you'd be very wrong. Developed by Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure's CTO, DoomPaint runs the original shareware version of Doom using MS Paint as the monitor for the game. The project is powered by an OLE clipboard hack that allows Doom to run at a solid 35fps. "The actual Doom engine (ViZDoom) runs the real shareware DOOM1.WAD — with the BSD-licensed Freedoom WADs covering the episodes shareware doesn't ship — and renders headlessly," writes Russinovich on the project's GitHub page. "Every frame is placed on the Windows clipboard and pasted into Paint's canvas as a genuine document edit." Doom really can run on anything 35fps is pretty good for MS Paint, right? Russinovich goes on to say that the game's low frame rate is part of DoomPaint's charm, and when you think about it, 35fps is pretty good as far as 90s gaming is concerned. There's even sound and music included in the MS Paint version of Doom. To be clear, Paint doesn't actually handle the compute side of the game and only renders it. If you want to try DoomPaint for yourself, you can find steps to get the game up and running in Microsoft Paint on Russinovich's GitHub page. Doom is famous for running on pretty much anything, ranging from gut bacteria to a pregnancy test. More recently, I covered a story where someone ported Doom to the Commodore 64, giving the already primitive-looking first-person shooter an even more pixelated look.