Wolfenstein 3D turns 30, happy birthday old bastard!
Wolfenstein 3D turns 30
Nowadays, if you say FPS, people throw unsold copies of a COD at random or, at most, of a Battlefield in your face, if the interlocutor has a slightly nonconformist spirit that COD, you know, does not like. everyone. Yet in the past it was not so, the FPS, however rampant genre and always on the crest of the wave, were few and represented, a bit like it was for the JRPG in the 90s and 2000s or for the open world of today, the spearhead of the videogame industry.If you were developing a FPS, yours was a cool development team, because an FPS almost always meant facing a remarkable production development, because in an era in which 3D was taking its first steps, giving the player a semblance of three-dimensionality was not easy, especially because we are talking about a period in which the maximum of three-dimensionality were the shadows that gave thickness to the sides of the Super Mario tubes.
A Doom-esque Port To The ATmega328
Doom holds a special place as one of the biggest games of the 1990s, as well as being one of the foundational blocks of the FPS genre. Long before 3D accelerators hit the market, iD Software’s hit was being played on computers worldwide, and later spread to all manner of other platforms. [David Ruiz] decided to build a cutdown version for everyone’s favourite, the ATmega328.
Due to the limited resources available, it’s not a direct port of Doom. [David] instead took some sprites and map data from the original game, and built a raycasting engine similar to that of Wolfenstein 3D. Despite the limited memory and CPU cycles, the basic game can run at between 8-11 FPS. There are fancy dithering tricks to help improve the sense of depth, a simplified enemy AI, and even a custom text library for generating the UI.
It’s a great example of what can be done with a seemingly underpowered part. We’ve seen similar work before, with Star Fox replicated on the Arduboy. A hacker’s ingenuity truly knows no bounds.
