Remember the time someone turned a watermelon into a Game Boy using a Raspberry Pi? Well now YouTuber Kevin McAleer has hacked a chicken nugget so he can play Doom on it.

Nugget anniversary

There I go again with the lightly misleading headline and intro but I just wanted to secure your eyeballs so we can all go on this repurposed-fake-processed-food journey together. It’s not a real chicken nugget, folks. But it is an exceptional retro McDonald’s Happy Meal toy. It’s only available in China and it was released a few months ago to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the chicken nugget. Nostalgia-mad millennials will be pumped to learn that the mini console is programmed to play only Tetris; or rather, it was until Kev got his hands on one.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
• Pimoroni Display HAT Mini
• Chicken Nugget Happy Meal toy

That’s a svelte hardware list, and all of the items are pretty affordable. Kevin snagged the Happy Meal toy for £15 from eBay and the total cost of the three items came in at £51.00.

How did he hack it?

Kev did away with the custom PCB inside the console and replaced it with a Raspberry Pi. The original screen also had to come out to make way for Pimoroni’s Display HAT. The Display HAT sits directly on the Raspberry Pi’s pin header.

You’ll need to install the 32-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS, then install Doom from the terminal by typing:

sudo apt install chocolate-doom

Check out Kev’s tutorial page for extra nuggets of detail. Then subscribe to his YouTube channel for a bazillion more Raspberry Pi projects, plus regular live hacking tutorials every Sunday evening.

Call for veggie alternatives

Now if somebody could hack one of the items on the vegetarian menu, that would be ace. The Veggie Dippers are ever so crumbly though. Maybe a hash brown? They’re greasy, but we’re low on options here. Perhaps I’ll stick with the watermelon Game Boy that has definitely rotted into oblivion by now.