Quake on the Nintendo DS!!!

[Monster]

I'll participate in DS quake!! We can own those PSP'ers with the stylus. Much better control and aim, as shown in metroid prime hunters.

[gamefreak]

im not buying it untill i see the actual thing, not a video.
i've seen many fake videos that look even more real than the one with the guy playing quake on ds. it probably IS fake, but that is my opinion

[FrikaC]

gamefreak obviously doesn't know what he's talking about when he said "the ds could not handle something is technical as quake, or graphics wise". Quake was ported to the (original) GP32 a few years ago by Anders Granlund. It runs quite sluggishly (due to using the unoptimized C renderer found in the source rather than potentially faster ARM9 assembly routines, which no one has yet bothered to write) and with no sound, but it definitely works, I have personally played it on my GP32. The GP32 has a single ARM9 core with selectable clock rate. When running Quake, it selects 133mhz as default. It has no special graphics capabilities, when drawing on the screen, you directly access the LCD's memory buffer.

By contrast, the Nintendo DS has two processors, an ARM7 and an ARM9 and although running at a much slower clockrates (67mhz for the main CPU, and 33mhz for the secondary ARM7) is also incorporates something that would make porting Quake much easier: A 3D accelerator. Without the huge burden of doing all the 3D rendering on the main CPU, you could easily run all the tertiary game logic in 67 mhz.

Note that the level and characters are untextured in the videos and are flat shaded. It is clear this is probably the intial stage of porting, and the person porting the code is just starting to use the under-documented 3D accelerator.

[FrikaC]

Additionally I've never heard of anyone ever selling a homebrew.

[Sajt]

gamefreak obviously doesn't know what he's talking about when he said "the ds could not handle something is technical as quake, or graphics wise". Quake was ported to the (original) GP32 a few years ago by Anders Granlund. It runs quite sluggishly (due to using the unoptimized C renderer found in the source rather than potentially faster ARM9 assembly routines, which no one has yet bothered to write) and with no sound, but it definitely works, I have personally played it on my GP32. The GP32 has a single ARM9 core with selectable clock rate. When running Quake, it selects 133mhz as default. It has no special graphics capabilities, when drawing on the screen, you directly access the LCD's memory buffer.

By contrast, the Nintendo DS has two processors, an ARM7 and an ARM9 and although running at a much slower clockrates (67mhz for the main CPU, and 33mhz for the secondary ARM7) is also incorporates something that would make porting Quake much easier: A 3D accelerator. Without the huge burden of doing all the 3D rendering on the main CPU, you could easily run all the tertiary game logic in 67 mhz.

Note that the level and characters are untextured in the videos and are flat shaded. It is clear this is probably the intial stage of porting, and the person porting the code is just starting to use the under-documented 3D accelerator.

They appear to be smooth shaded to me... It's a little disconcerting that he's having trouble with textures... textures shouldn't be that hard with any 3d accelerator api, should it? But still, this looks great, and I'm sure if I had a DS I'd get it or even help out.

[Monster]

If this happens, I'm buying it immediately! YUM. Portable quake... *drools*