A Doom-like engine on the Raspberry Pi – 9800 lines of bare metal assembly

[habosa]

I don't even know what to say ... 9800 lines of assembly is so few. I am very impressed. I think I might use more lines writing this in a "modern" language.

Game developers always impress me.

[Narishma]

Well, it's only 9800 lines because it's incomplete. It's barely a tech demo.

[delecti]

Raspberry Pi seems to be the new target of Atwood's Law in place of Javascript.

Any application that can be ported to Raspberry Pi will eventually be ported to Raspberry Pi.

[hamburglar]

Considering the point of the Raspberry Pi foundation is to provide a readily available low cost general computing platform for learning and experimentation, it seems entirely appropriate that people would port stuff to it for the sake of porting stuff to it.

[xahrepap]

Porting Doom to everything has always been a thing. Way before Atwood's Law was ever a thing. It was the original Atwood's Law. :)

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TuupoxmeQ6U

[Smushman]

not to denigrate the hard work... but without a keyboard, just how am I supposed to enter cheat codes??

Nice work BTW.

[morsch]

Clearly, the answer is you write a keyboard emulator running on the RPi in 9800 lines of of assembly.

[wbsun]

An (probably) easy way is to connect a switch to a GPIO pin, then watch for special patterns of on/off sequences as cheat codes :), and you end up programming a computer in binary code.

[z92]

The original Doom ran on 33MHz processor and 4MB RAM. I can't understand why it might have any problem running on RPi.

[morsch]

It doesn't. I imagine it's still a fun way to learn ARM assembly and an impressive achievement. Note that apparently they didn't use any operating system and built their own controller from scratch.

[duaneb]

I played doom on my ipod mini. I'm pretty sure this wasn't to stress the insane hardware of a pi so much as x86 is completely miserable to bare-metal program in.

[lcswi]

Hm, that's hardly anything like doom. It is more like a very basic raycasting engine from several years before that. Doom in 9800 would be really impressive. This does not seem very special if you ever wrote your own engine like that.

[nathancahill]

They wrote a raycasting engine in 9800 lines of assembly, running on a Pi, using Doom's textures. Is it Doom? No, but it's pretty darn impressive. Avoid gratuitous negativity.

[JonathonW]

Looks like they have part of what made Doom unique (at the time)-- they've got height differences and non-perpendicular walls, but don't quite have the same lighting and texture mapping capability that Doom had.

And the demo doesn't show whether or not they have Doom's dynamic capabilities (that let level builders make things like moving elevators).

This looks like it's probably somewhere between Wolfenstein 3D and Doom in terms of engine features.

[afandian]

As a first-year University assembly project in 4 weeks, I'd be a bit more hesitant to judge.

[myth_buster]

From the comments:

  OP's project isn't a simple port. They wrote an original DOOM-like engine, 
  from scratch, in assembly language. It only looks like 
  DOOM because they're using DOOM textures.

[ehaliewicz2]

It's a common misconception, but Doom uses a BSP-tree based renderer, not raycasting.

[akhilcacharya]

This is their first year project...

[Cyph0n]

Great work for a first year project. It was completed in 3 weeks according to the thread. I wouldn't have been able to pull it off.

[confiscate]

good job guys. the controller on the breadboard looks pretty neat

[kcsongor]

that is actually not a breadboard, the stuff is soldered :)

[Negative1]

Keep in mind they are calling it a "replica", not a port. From the video there's some form of game logic, the raycaster and asset loader. Other than that, it doesn't appear to be the full game.

Still, though, AWESOME! Can't wait to check out the code when it goes up on Github (they said soon).

[deevus]

If only the cyber-demon was always that easy!