4 ms·
Unlike most games of the era, Quake was designed to be portable. It's not tied to the PC / MS-DOS platform in the same way as many other cutting-edge games were
by pavlov 4y ago
Unlike most games of the era, Quake was designed to be portable. It's not tied to the PC / MS-DOS platform in the same way as many other cutting-edge games were. For example, there was a lot of x86 assembly used at the time, often just intermixed with C code with no clear boundaries to enable porting to a different architecture.
AFAIK, Quake was originally developed on NeXT boxes and ported to PC later. The level editor was a native app using the NeXTSTEP APIs which Apple renamed Cocoa:
https://quakewiki.org/wiki/QuakeEd https://quakewiki.org/wiki/QuakeEd
So, it's a fun kind of homecoming that it now runs on the wrist-sized NeXT box.
- petercooper 4y agoJust for a fun comparison. The original NeXT computer: 25MHz Motorola 68030 plus copro, 8MB RAM, 256MB storage, 300W power usage, $15k in 2021 dollars, weighed a lot The Apple Watch Series 7: 1800MHz t8301 CPU (but scales up and down), 1GB RAM, 32GB storage, 50-100 mW (I think?), $399, weighs 35g or so What a difference 33 years makes!
- klelatti 4y agoThe watch has similar specs to the first MacBook Pro from 2006!
- anthk 4y agoThe watch is more powerful than the netbook I'm typing on right now.
- klelatti 4y agoI sometimes think we have an 'embarrassment of riches' today - more computing power than we know what to do with!
- jaywalk 4y agoNo, we know exactly what to do with it: run a bunch of Electron apps to use it all up.
- whatch 4y agoIt's always Electron apps come up when someone mentions that we have too many resources :)
- neurostimulant 4y agoIf companies can produce software in half the time by doubling the CPU, RAM and disk usage, they will do it if they can get away with it.
- pjmlp 4y agoExcept the little detail that there is very little NeXT on that wrist-sized box, other than Objective-C is still the main language.
- smm11 4y agoFor a brief moment NeXT was trying to spread Openstep far and wide. What a future everyone could have had, rather than those locked into the Mac ecosystem. Which is most in this country, actually, so same thing I guess.
- pjmlp 4y agoMany Java haters have little idea that Java itself and JavaEE were heavily influenced by Sun working alongside NeXT in such attempts. https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhe...
- flohofwoe 4y ago...the OS should be quite similar too, assuming watchOS is anything like iOS and macOS, because macOS essentially is the present day incarantion of NextStep due to the NeXT-Apple reverse takeover ;) ...not very relevant for DOOM of course, because that's just plain C for the most part, but interesting little tidbit nonetheless.
- pjmlp 4y agoExcept plenty of stuff has changed since NeXT days. Objective-C driver kit no longer exists, its C++ replacement is on its way out, being replaced by a userspace version. The watch uses watchOS UI KIT, is isn't either UI Kit nor Cocoa, so three generations apart from NeXTSTEP UI framework, which is anyway being replaced by SwiftUI. watchOS uses a customized version of bitcode as deployment format, which is now being transitioned to actual native code in upcoming versions. Related to Doom, watchOS doesn't do OpenGL, or NIB files from Project Builder. So almost nothing like NeXTSTEP.
- bluedino 4y agoI think that even Doom was developed on NeXT (the game, not just the level editor), the alpha came out for NeXT before DOS.