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Comment by romanhn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The GBA port of OpenLara (original Tomb Raider engine reimplementation) is even more mind blowing:

https://youtu.be/_GVSLcqGP7g

Whoa!

holy f*cking shit... that's pretty amazing

Even 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

Which, as it turns out, was written by the same person as features in the OP, Randy Linden

Randy 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_lind...

To 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.

This 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.

As 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.

Yes, also factor in a lot of us were like 19 years old and this was our first project and also we were the lead or only programmer. :D

Absolute heroes of code =)

Nope. The GBA was a 32 bit console, much more powerful than the SNES/Genesis. It was halfway between an SNES and a PSX.

The genesis is arguably a 32 bit console as well. The genesis has only a 16 bit bus to memory, but the GBA has only a 16 bit bus to it's cart and most RAM as well, leaving only on die RAM and MMIO with 32 bit bus accesses.

Additionally, it's GPU is very much derived from the NES->SNES family of PPUs. VRAM can be used as a LFB, but it's generally not the best use of the system.

I'd argue it's about halfway between a stock SNES/Genesis and an SNES/Genesis with a cart addon chip like an SVP or Super FX.

>The genesis is arguably a 32 bit console as well.

24 ;)

The genesis has 24 bit address bus, but my 64 bit CPU I'm typing this on only has a 39 bit physical address bus (48 bit virtual) and we still call it a 64 bit CPU.

It 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.

The 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#Architectu...

In 2k lines of assembly apparently.

Which sounds like a bit of a golf too for a ~quake compatible engine!

The video says 200k lines

Ah I must have misheard, that sounds more realistic.

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