Every time a brand new piece of {hardware} is launched, somebody will all the time ask the query “does it run Doom?” Often, they’re referring to Id Software program’s 1993 unique — however one hacker has answered within the affirmative for the extra demanding Doom 3 (2004) on the versatile new Arduino UNO Q single-board pc.
“Answered the basic query ‘does it run Doom?” by working Doom 3 […] on my [Arduino] UNO Q,” pseudonymous maker “magichorsie” explains of the venture. “The sport is working natively on the UNO Q and has been modified to show the in-game well being on the UNO’s LED matrix. I even have an App Lab app working which receives the well being information from the sport and passes it utilizing the RouterBridge to the [STMicroelectronics] STM32 [coprocessor] — which ultimately shows it on the matrix. The audio is thru a Bluetooth speaker.”
If all that sounds a bit a lot for a humble Arduino UNO improvement board, you most likely missed the announcement of the Arduino UNO Q — a collaboration between Arduino and new company proprietor Qualcomm to show what was as soon as an eight-bit microcontroller dev board household right into a surprisingly highly effective single-board pc, pushed by the Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 with 4 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 cores working at as much as 2GHz and a 3D-capable Adreno graphics processor.
Operating Doom on a microcontroller is old-hat; Doom 3, launched greater than a decade after the unique, is an even bigger problem. The sport’s unique system necessities referred to as for a an Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP processor working at 1.5GHz or above, no less than 384MB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce 3 or AMD Radeon 8500 or larger graphics card with no less than 64MB of RAM. That, you’ll notice, places its necessities someplace comfortably under the capabilities of the Arduino UNO Q — and implies that, with a recompilation from x86 to Arm carried out on the Arduino UNO Q itself plus a bit hackery, Doom 3 will run simply nice on the UNO Q.
Arduino’s new App Lab is used to drag well being information from the sport and print it to the UNO Q’s on-board LED matrix. (📹: magichorsie)
The ultimate twist within the venture is the usage of Arduino’s new App Lab, which is designed to bridge the primary Qualcomm Dragonwing processor and its Linux working system to an STMicro STM32 coprocessor for real-time workloads: utilizing this, magichorsie was in a position to pull out the well being information from the sport and have it printed to the Arduino UNO Q’s on-board LED matrix, updating in real-time because the participant character takes harm.
Extra particulars on the venture can be found on Reddit; supply code for the App Lab integration has not been supplied, however the model of Doom 3 used, dhewm 3, is out there on GitHub beneath the GNU Normal Public License 3 for anybody seeking to attempt compiling it for the Arduino UNO Q themselves.
