Recent searches
Search options
@Olly42@nerdculture.deQuake ported to Arduino Nano Matter. [Using only 276kb RAM]
Nicola Wrachien with Silicon Labs created this fun handheld, porting Quake using the Arduino Nano Matter. For easy playing a custom controller shaped board was designed with joysticks and a screen.
![[ImageSource: Nicola Wrachien]
For a much tougher challenge, a group from Silicon Labs decided to port DOOM‘s successor, Quake, to the Arduino Nano Matter Board platform instead even though this platform has some pretty significant limitations for a game as advanced as Quake.
<https://community.silabs.com/s/share/a5UVm000000Vi1ZMAS/quake-ported-to-arduino-nano-matter-and-sparkfun-thing-plus-matter-boards?language=en_US>
To begin work on the memory problem, the group began with a port of Quake originally designed for Windows, allowing them to use a modern Windows machine to whittle down the memory usage before moving over to hardware. They do have a flash memory module available as well, but there’s a speed penalty with this type of memory. To improve speed they did what any true gamer would do with their system: overclock the processor. This got them to around 10 frames per second, which is playable, but not particularly enjoyable.
The further optimizations to improve the FPS required a much deeper dive which included generating lookup tables instead of relying on computation, optimizing some of the original C programming, coding some functions in assembly and only refreshing certain sections of the screen when needed.](https://nerdculture.de/system/media_attachments/files/114/206/081/241/901/037/original/72dec8d287dd1c33.png "[ImageSource: Nicola Wrachien]
For a much tougher challenge, a group from Silicon Labs decided to port DOOM‘s successor, Quake, to the Arduino Nano Matter Board platform instead even though this platform has some pretty significant limitations for a game as advanced as Quake.
<https://community.silabs.com/s/share/a5UVm000000Vi1ZMAS/quake-ported-to-arduino-nano-matter-and-sparkfun-thing-plus-matter-boards?language=en_US>
To begin work on the memory problem, the group began with a port of Quake originally designed for Windows, allowing them to use a modern Windows machine to whittle down the memory usage before moving over to hardware. They do have a flash memory module available as well, but there’s a speed penalty with this type of memory. To improve speed they did what any true gamer would do with their system: overclock the processor. This got them to around 10 frames per second, which is playable, but not particularly enjoyable.
The further optimizations to improve the FPS required a much deeper dive which included generating lookup tables instead of relying on computation, optimizing some of the original C programming, coding some functions in assembly and only refreshing certain sections of the screen when needed.")