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An absolutely incredible achievement. Though to clarify - this is not Quake running on Game Boy, but rather a custom engine hand-written in assembly that can ru
by romanhn 4y ago
An absolutely incredible achievement. Though to clarify - this is not Quake running on Game Boy, but rather a custom engine hand-written in assembly that can run Quake levels (or, I think, just the first level anyways). Which, in my mind, is even more impressive.
- tomxor 4y agoIn 2k lines of assembly apparently. Which sounds like a bit of a golf too for a ~quake compatible engine!
- kube-system 4y agoThe video says 200k lines
- tomxor 4y agoAh I must have misheard, that sounds more realistic.
- jonny_eh 4y agoIt looks and plays like Quake, it is Quake. It just doesn't use the original engine. Similarly, the recent re-release of Doom doesn't use the original Doom engine, it uses Unity, but it's still Doom.
- ThatPlayer 4y agoThe re-releases of Doom do use the original Doom, alongside Unity. Here's where we get into Theseus' ship: the game logic engine itself is still original Doom's, but Unity is used for the video output, sound, and input engines, allowing for easier ports because of the difference between console and phone graphic APIs and input options. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Classic_Unity_port#Architecture https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Classic_Unity_port#Architectu...
- monocasa 4y agoTo be fair, ports of games for that class of console would often be complete rewrites. Sometimes even the assets would be redrawn just from looking at another version of the game running. Remember, despite coming out later, the gameboy advance would be in the space of SNES/Genesis if it were a home console.
- djmips 4y agoThis was often by necessity, I worked on some of these ports and we would just get the game on whatever machine it was coming from (cart, disk, arcade machine) and then we would literally reverse engineer it as best we could - which usually meant just playing it a lot and video taping and making notes. Then we would re-implement / draw / compose a work-alike version on the target platform.
- JohnBooty 4y agoAs a kid, I always thought the developers of these ports were simply not very good. But once I started writing my own code and working in the industry, I realized that you guys were insanely talented people working under ridiculously punishing deadlines and (as you said) zero access to the original source code, assets, etc. Not familiar with your work in particular but in general, what a heroic and underappreciated game dev niche. Much respect for all that the unheralded port programmers managed to accomplish against the odds.
- anthk 4y ago
- bombcar 4y agoEven Doom itself had the engine rewritten to work on some of the consoles it was actually released on. Most people consider "it runs Doom" to be "it runs the PC version of Doom, modified" but there were other engines. The most famous may be SNES Doom, https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Super_NES https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Super_NES
- capekwasright 4y agoWhich, as it turns out, was written by the same person as features in the OP, Randy Linden
- blaerk 4y agoRandy talked about the doom snes port (among other things) during fosdem 2021, can’t remember if he mentioned Quake , it was a very interesting interview though https://archive.fosdem.org/2021/schedule/speaker/randal_linden/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2021/schedule/speaker/randal_lind...
- nsxwolf 4y agoThe GBA port of OpenLara (original Tomb Raider engine reimplementation) is even more mind blowing: https://youtu.be/_GVSLcqGP7g https://youtu.be/_GVSLcqGP7g