Looks nice for such wimpy hardware.
But using 16-bit Z-buffer for 1-bit display seems to be an overkill. Sorting polygons works mostly fine if done right, especially if BSP tree is already used.
Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#12LCD 1 (2022) is an ASCII art project on the same display (by Sharp) of the PlayDate.
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#13Actually done a good job - talks about dithering, perspective correct mapping and the artifacts seen in the PS1 era etc. Pretty good start.
Add more lighting and shadows to the game before that dithering pass and then see how far you can push this, and write about it. Cheers! :)
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#14Thanks for sharing both an amazing topic - engineering with significant constraints, a great medium - handheld game devices, as well as some wisdom - If you want to make actual progress, try to aim for "good enough".
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#15This is breathtaking. I did something similar[1] porting a 3D dice roller I wrote to a $60 GBA clone, and I _thought_ that was hardcore already. This is next level.
[1]: https://blog.myli.page/rolling-dice-on-a-60-handheld-08be278...
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#16[flagged]
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#17+1 for TrenchBroom, it’s amazing software.
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#18Does the upscaling from 200x120 happen pre or post dithering?
If my eyes don't deceive me, the upscaling is happening post-dithering, which I think is a shame.
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#19For anyone who enjoys this sort of thing, I found this postmortem of an Alone in the Dark clone for PICO-8 highly informative: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3804
This is more interesting since it's actually 3D
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#20Remind me of a similar quest of mine from... 15 years ago or so. Porting Quake on a GP2X handheld with no GPU, not even an FPU, run by an ARMv4. I could not compress the textures enough at the time so you could play only for a few seconds before the memory became too fragmented and the game stopped. But I managed to port a few other games. The PlayDate is a supoercomputer compared to an ARMv4 from 15years ago, but that antique GP2X was at least capable of true-color :). Should still have the code somewhere on github, but that's probably completely unusable on any hardware available in 2026. Maybe the "opengl" compatibility layer could still be useful though?