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

Two and a half years ago, I started my now longest real-world software experiment. 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. The issue here being, each incrementation would cause the variable to slowly get closer to an overflow, realistically this would never happen in a normal scenario, although it got me curious on just how long it would take until the game would crash due to this.

I did a few calculations, I don’t remember the specifics of it sadly as it has been over two years since that point and I sadly did not document it back then (or I did, but on a partition I no longer have access to) but I remember having gotten roughly 2 1/2 years of possible runtime before an overflow. Obviously, I wanted to know if this would actually happen in the real game on real hardware.

So I set up DOOM on a small PDA, powered through a DIY 18650 based UPS which itself was connected to the USB port of my router for a constant 5V supply. I left the system running and mostly forgot about it.

… Until today when I noticed a pop-up appearing on the device, not long ago from posting this to the board. The game had crashed, only hours after the two and a half year mark, proving that the variable did indeed overflow and cause the expected hard crash of the game:

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