Im wondering what games beside doom and classic arcade games like pong, can run on any sort of device and what the limitations are? everyone says will it run doom? but what others games have the same support doom has?

Im not sure if this post goes here but ill start here.

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[–] 20 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Don't think any game has the same support doom has. Doom has become a benchmark of sorts so gets ported to the strangest of places. Not normally places you would bother to port any game. It is done for the challenge of the port rather than any practical reason.

    There are tonnes of games that could run in the same places as doom, many could run in far more places. But doom is complex enough to be an interesting challenge while being simple enough to run on very limited hardware. And has been open sourced while being a classic icon which makes it attractive to be a benchmark for getting to run in the weirdest of places.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    The architecture of Doom was specifically designed for portability. If you’d like to learn more, check out this video. For those that don’t know, tl;dr, the game’s structure is compartmentalized with specific connections (interfaces). The game logic runs separate of engine logic. If you write the specific engine hookups, the game logic should then run. Also math & clever level design implementation.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Solitaire, 2048, Chess, Zork

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Attack of the PETSCII Robots. Been ported to a ridiculous number of retro computers.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Another World. It's impressive how it's done, the game is programmed in a custom bytecode, and runs on an interpreter for the game. Porting the game to other platforms just requiere implementing the interpreter.

    That allowed the game to be ported even to GBA.

    There is a blog post that explains everything about it, and it's super interesting.

    https://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That’s a fun question. I’d also add Snake to the list — it’s been recreated on calculators, old Nokia phones, smart fridges, and even in Excel. It’s probably one of the most reimplemented games ever. Not as “epic” as Doom, but definitely just as portable!

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    Tic-Tac-Toe.

    Edit: I remember that were a version of pac-man that was like 32x32 pixels.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Snake would also fall under that category

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    We know Tic-Tac-Toe runs on really old government command and control systems. It will even support the game realizing the only win is to not play.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago
    [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Somewhat the opposite, but can it run Crysis?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    Any sort of device? Well, to run a game, at a minimum there must be some kind of input and output, but not necessarily any storage. I think the one that could run on the most would be one that requires only one button for input, and one LED for output, that just tests your reflexes. It would have to read out your time by counting out flashes. You could also have a Simon-like game, with pattern memorization.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Any laptop made in the last decade will run basically everything from the GBA back to the Atari 2600.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Anything can run on anything if you have enough storage. Computing power is not a problem if you don't care about frame rate and resolution. We first jumped from 24 FPS to 30, next to 60 and soon we will jump to 120. We jumped from black and white to gray scale to colors, from 16 colors to 256 then to 16bit and so on. From 320x240 to 800x600 to 1024x768 to full hd to 4k and we're near to 8k. Rendering speed is the real limit.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yes to all of the above! You just described my gaming childhood (except mine started in amber/ green screen). 80s and 90s were where it was at, as far as videogaming goes. Kids these days don't know what they've missed.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Rollercoaster Tycoon and RCT2 should work well on most machines. They are smallish games and written in assembly.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I feel like that would make them much harder to get running on different things. No compiled code means you would have to rewrite the whole game for different instruction sets. Very difficult for anything that isn't x86.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I vote we try it with a bunch of old point and click adventure games like Monkey Island or any other that have simplistic enough graphics and gameplay. Couldn't tell you how to do it because I don't know what code they run and how inefficient it could be by the standards at the time, but I feel like a lot of old point and click games could probably run just fine on a lot of modern devices that aren't computers, if given a Doom level community support.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    My understanding is that Doom can run on any device because it is written in C. So any game written in C could be compiled to run on your target device.

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