Thanks to Mini-iOS: "Doom" on an Apple HDMI Lightning dongle
Nice hack: A hobbyist has managed to run "Doom" on an old HDMI adapter from Apple. The background is interesting.
Doom goes HDMI adapter: There's a little iOS inside.
(Image: Nyan Satan / YouTube)
Apple's so-called Lightning Digital AV Adapter actually only has one job: The device, which costs 59 euros from the manufacturer, allows iPhones and iPads (as well as iPod touch from the 6th generation) to redirect their screen output to an HDMI display, be it a monitor, a TV, or a projector. This includes not only the video signal but also the audio signal. However, a hobbyist has now shown that there is even more to the HDMI Lightning dongle: a small computer. And “Doom” is now finally running on it.
Dongle (still) connected to the Mac
YouTuber “Nyan Satan” shows how this actually works: He has managed to jailbreak the Lightning Digital AV adapter. As it turns out, the included SoC is sufficiently powerful. Among other things, it is used to compress the video signal. The operating system in the dongle is a stripped-down version of iOS. After bypassing the security measures, he was able to run “Doom” directly on the dongle. The frame rate is not bad at all.
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The problem, however, is that the SoC only has a small amount of memory. To play “Doom”, the Lightning Digital AV adapter is therefore connected to a Mac – via a Lightning USB-C adapter. On the other side is a normal monitor, for which the dongle is also intended. The variant is not yet perfect. “There is still a lot of work to do,” writes “Nyan Satan”.
Darwin with Apple Secure Boot
There are currently no further details on how the hack was successful. “Nyan Satan”, who also goes by John on X, announced that he is planning a “write up” at a later date. Currently, there is only the short video on YouTube. It was already known in 2019 that the dongle is actually a computer. It runs a Darwin kernel, including Apple Secure Boot. On X, “Nyan Satan” has already been asked to port Linux to the dongle.
Whether this is technically possible remains unclear. The hardware hacker's GitHub repo can be found here. He also publishes other experiments there that deal with older Apple devices, such as the iPod nano. Incidentally, current iPhones from generation 15 onwards no longer need the dongle: they come with a USB-C port and support USB-C monitors directly.
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