Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Doom has been ported to an earbud

doombuds.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 143 posts

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#21

Post by TrainedMonkey »

nehalem wrote: post #15

Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.

> CPU: Dual-core 300MHz ARM Cortex-M4F

It's absolute bonkers amount of hardware scaling that happened since Doom was released. Yes, this is a tremendous overkill here, but the crazy part here is that this fits into an earpiece.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#22

Post by npsomaratna »

On a tangent: I remember reading John Carmak saying that as game engines became more complex, he had to relinquish the idea of writing all the (engine) code himself, and start to rely on other folks contributions as well (this was in an interview after the release of Doom 3).

I wonder what his feelings are in this age of AI.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#23

Post by Insanity »

npsomaratna wrote: post #22

On a tangent: I remember reading John Carmak saying that as game engines became more complex, he had to relinquish the idea of writing all the (engine) code himself, and start to rely on other folks contributions as well (this was in an interview after the release of Doom 3). I wonder what his feelings are in this age of AI.

John is now on a mission to make AGI a reality. I’d say given his own investment there, he’s probably positive about it.

Just speculation on my part of course.

Also, “masters of doom” is such a good book. Recommend it for anyone who wants to peek behind the scenes of how Carmack, Romero, and iD software built Doom (and Wolf3D etc).

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#24

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

nehalem wrote: post #15

Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.

If it can run Doom it can run malware.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#25

Post by Telemakhos »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #21
nehalem wrote: post #15

Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.

> CPU: Dual-core 300MHz ARM Cortex-M4F It's absolute bonkers amount of hardware scaling that happened since Doom was released. Yes, this is a tremendous overkill here, but the crazy part here is that this fits into an earpiece.

I remember playing Doom on a single-core 25MHz 486 laptop. It was, at the time, an amazing machine, hundreds of times more powerful than the flight computer that ran the Apollo space capsule, and now it is outclassed by an earbud.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#26

Post by nehalem »

varjag wrote: post #20
nehalem wrote: post #15

Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.

Earbuds often have features like mic beam forming and noise cancellation which require a substantial degree of processing power. It's hardly unjustified compared to your Teams instance making fans spin or Home Assistant bringing down an RPi to its knees.

No doubt, maybe should I have emphasised the "general" part of "general purpose" more. Not a hardware person myself, I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#29

Post by primitivesuave »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #11

Im waiting for the post "Doom ported to disposable Vape chip" :-D

The Puya PY32 series MCUs found in most vapes have 3kb of RAM and 24kb of ROM, whereas Doom requires at least 4MB of RAM. Assuming Moore's law also applies to the computing power inside a disposable vape, we should be seeing that post in around a decade :)

Re: Doom has been ported to an earbud

#30

Post by shevy-java »

I am a bit said that it is always Doom.

Now ... I played the game when I was young. It was addictive. I don't think it was a good game but it was addictive. And somewhat simple.

So what is the problem then? Well ... games have gotten a lot bigger, often more complicated. Trying to port that to small platforms is close to impossible. This makes me sad. I think the industry, excluding indie tech/startups, totally lost the focus here. The games that are now en vogue, do not interest me at all. Sometimes they have interesting ideas - I liked little nightmares here - but they are huge and very different from the older games. And often much more boring too.

One of my favourite DOS games was master of orion 1 for instance. I could, despite its numerous flaws, play that again and again and again. Master of Orion 2 was not bad either, but it was nowhere near as addictive and the gameplay was also more convoluted and slower.

(Sometimes semi-new games are also ok such as Warcraft 3. I am not saying ALL new games are bad, but it seems as if games were kind of dumbed down to be more like a video to watch, with semi-few interactive elements as you watch it. That's IMO not really a game. And just XP grinding for the big bad wolf to scale to the next level, deal out more damage, as your HP grows ... that's not really playing either. That's just wasting your time.)

Post reply on HN