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aresant

This guy's combo of hardware and software engineering is stunning.

That he then has the aesthetic capability to knock out a beautiful fucking box for the cartridge is just humbling.

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While this whole project certainly is incredible, the box he created is a remix of existing art and design work:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/564603-wolfenstein-3d/images/1456...

http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=File:Wolfenstein_3...

Yeah well I wouldn't even be able to make a blank cardboard box.

Exactly this. I hope to high heaven that this person makes piles of money for how potent their grey matter is.

I'm wondering if he is throwing hardware at a software problem?

Is the gameboy hardware not good enough to play wolf3d by itself? Is a co-processor needed, or just more optimized / better software?

Not even close. The GBC used what is essentially a Zilog Z80 running at 8.3Mhz.

Most problematic is that the Z80 is only an 8bit CPU.

Original minimum requirement on PC for Wolf 3D was a 286, which was a 16bit processor running at 25mhz.

The 386 ran at 25Mhz. I'm pretty certain I had Wolfenstine 3D running on a 286 at 12Mhz .. but that was a long time ago and my memory could be off.

I remembered I couldn't play Doom though. It required a 386+.

DOOM had a more sophisticated and CPU-demanding graphical engine.

Another hurdle is the graphics hardware. The Game Boy uses a tile and sprite based approach, which is great for a wide variety of 2D games but becomes a major bottleneck when you want rendering at a lower level. Suddenly you don't only have to calculate the pixel color, you have to find its offset in the tile map and write it to the correct bits of the correct byte of the tile.

The 256 color VGA frame buffer is perfect for this type of work because of the 1-1 relationship between bytes and pixels, and the simple correlation between memory offset and pixel position.

So you have a slower CPU that's 8-bit (basically an 8080) rather than 16-bit doing more work because of the complex graphics model.

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