Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware

minki_the_avali | 327 points

About a year ago I was looking at Crash Bandicoot timer systems and I found that Crash 3 has a constantly incrementing int32. It only resets if you die.

Left for 2.26 years, it will overflow.

When it does finally overflow, we get "minus" time and the game breaks in funny ways. I did a video about it: https://youtu.be/f7ZzoyVLu58

jbreckmckye | 13 hours ago

Does that hardware traps overflows or something?

  I had read an article about how DOOMs engine works and noticed how a variable for tracking the demo kept being incremented even after the next demo started. This variable was compared with a second one storing its previous value

Doesn't sound like something that would crash, I wonder what was the actual crash
shultays | 4 hours ago

Literally unplayable, someone should fix that.

Doom is actually such a good game, I always go back to it every few years. The 2016 reboot is also pretty fun, but the later two in the series didn’t do it for me.

Insanity | 11 hours ago

Just be glad you knew what the bug was before you started. After 2.5 years... "Shit, I forgot to enable debug logging"

spjt | 10 hours ago

Since we've hugged the site to death, have an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250916234009/https://lenowo.or...

Sadly it appears that archive.org didn't capture all of the site formatting, but at least the text is there.

LorenDB | 11 hours ago

Notably, DOOM crashed before Windows CE.

jraph | 7 hours ago

This is a level of testing that exceeds what the testers I know commit to. I myself was annoyed the five or so times yesterday we had to sit and wait to check the error handling after a 30 second timeout in the system I work on.

Zobat | 6 hours ago

2038 is going to be a fun year.

JoshGlazebrook | 13 hours ago

CNR. Please attach video.

kwertyoowiyop | 21 minutes ago

Quick! John Carmack needs to be brought into this immediately.

otikik | 3 hours ago

Was this specific to the PDA port or the core doom code?

@ID_AA_Carmack Are you going to write a patch to fix this?

ustad | 6 hours ago

Props again to the id team. No doubt something like that engineered by most folks today would have died long before the 2 year mark due to memory fragmentation if not outright leaks.

piker | 4 hours ago

I am going to need to see this replicated before I can believe.

0cf8612b2e1e | 14 hours ago

The easy way to e-Nostradamus predictions:

"See this crash?

I predicted it years ago.

Don't ask me how, I couldn't tell you."

p.s. I had an old iPaq that I wouldn't have trusted to run for longer than a day and stay stable, kudos for that at the very minimum.

serf | 13 hours ago

Seems to be a PocketPC port of Doom, with no source given or even a snippet of the relevant code/variable name/etc. shown at all.

ranger_danger | 13 hours ago

This headline gave me a heart attack... I misread the site's name as Lenovo, and as I'm responsible for a whole lot of their servers running for years in a critical role... heart attack.

Maybe I need my morning coffee. :)

jeffrallen | 8 hours ago

Literally unplayable

johnjames87 | 4 hours ago
[deleted]
| 16 hours ago

It's good it didn't took a billion years to overflow. That would have been quite a long wait.

DeathArrow | 8 hours ago

Literally unplayable.

moomin | 6 hours ago

Has this ever come up in a TAS of custom levels?

casey2 | 11 hours ago

glitchless?

ZsoltT | 9 hours ago

Not a comment on the post, but I sure wish Jira would load even half as quickly as this site.

sunrunner | 13 hours ago