esp32-doom VS esp32-gameboy

Since it looks to be built on the ESP32 platform, the answer is likely yes (but you'd need a display...) https://github.com/espressif/esp32-doom

I think actually there are a couple of DOOM ports for the platform.

My most pressing question is, can it play Doom?

There seems to be a port for ESP32 [0] and Arduino Nano does play it [1], so maybe?

[0]: https://github.com/espressif/esp32-doom

[1]: https://m5stack.hackster.io/naveenbskumar/yes-arduino-nano-e...

Perhaps try this: https://github.com/espressif/esp32-doom

should be fine, yeah

There is a port of DOOM for an ESP32, proving that it can be done, however I have added additional constraints on myself as follows:

Now all we need for DOOM everywhere is to make the memory management more portable. It's still difficult to port DOOM to microcontrollers like the ESP32 and ARM Cortex-M and RISC-V, which are easily fast enough to run it but which have much less RAM than a 90's PC (128-512K vs 4MB). But they can use external RAM via SPI which is very cheap for 4 or 8 MB, and while that is slower than 90's DRAM because of the serial protocol it should be good enough with a very simple cacheing strategy?

Have a look at this then. This uses the Arduino platform, but a much more capable microcontroller. tl;dr: It looks pretty challenging for a school project. You will either download someone else's code and just run it, or it will be too much. If you are supposed to do it yourself, then a calculator sounds far more reasonable, and it will still not be easy. You need to tinker with a keypad/way of input, a screen, a state machine, implement PEMDAS etc. Maybe start small (limit yourself to 2 variables and one operation at a time), and then build on that.