OpenLara ported to ESP32-P4 (No GPU, 30fps software rendering)

Hi HN,

A few months ago I ported DOOM to the ESP32-P4 (which didn't have a port at the time, unlike the ESP32 and S3). Today I'm sharing my new port for this SoC: Tomb Raider 1, running via the open-source OpenLara engine.

The main technical constraint of the ESP32-P4 is that it lacks a GPU. To get around this, I looked closely at how the classic MS-DOS and Game Boy Advance versions handled the engine, relying entirely on software rendering.

It was a great nostalgic trip going back to manual triangle rasterization, the Painter's algorithm, and other low-level graphics programming concepts that we usually just hand off to the GPU nowadays.

It runs surprisingly well, holding a steady 30 FPS.

I’d be happy to answer any questions about the porting process, the ESP32-P4 architecture, or handling software rendering on embedded systems. The code is entirely on GitHub.