This is Doom, running headless, on Ubuntu Arm… on a satellite

Doom takes place on Mars, but up until recently, it has only been played on Earth. However, at the Ubuntu Summit, one enterprising developer explained how he extended the well-established "will it run Doom?" meme all the way into space. When it was first introduced, id Software's Doom demanded a fairly capable 486 PC, and its …

[David 132]

I'm still confused, 14 years later...

The "Antique Code Show" article that this story links to, giving the Reg's 20-year retrospective on Doom, was published Wed 23 Nov 2011, and opens with the words "id Software’s Doom – the definitive first-person shooter – is 20 years old today. It was uploaded to the University of Washington’s servers at midnight, 10 December 1993"

Now is it just me, or was there some very odd date-calculation going on there?

Did we move away from the Gregorian calendar at some point in the intervening period, losing several days again?

A pint for all concerned in this latest endeavour, nonetheless.

[HuBo]

Re: I'm still confused, 14 years later...

Good point! I guess if 1992 was year 1 of id Doom development, 1993 was year 2, and November 2011 became the start of year 20 ...

But hey, cool TFA and video (well worth the 8 minutes)! And as Ólafur notes, it should be interesting to see what folks end up doing with OPS-SAT VOLT (expected to launch in 2026) that'll feature the Leopard DPU with its Zynq UltraScale FPGA sporting quad Cortex-A53 CPUs (as compared to the Cyclone V SoC's dual-core Cortex-A9 in this past OPS-SAT).

Should be fun to watch ...

[Sgt_Oddball]

Re: I'm still confused, 14 years later...

So there'll be a satellite that not only could play Doom but might even be good enough to play Crysis? (the original, not the latest re-mastered version)

I'll get my coat - it's the one with the Casio graphics calculator in it....

[stiine]

I give the this article's translation of his video a 6 out of 10. Watch the video for yourself because the problems he had to overcome were presented in a much more humourous Waage.

[Dan 55]

I couldn't view the embedded video (error 15, whatever that means), so here's a link.

[Liam Proven]

> I give the this article's translation of his video a 6 out of 10. Watch the video for yourself because the problems he had to overcome were presented in a much more humourous Waage.

Um. Tagged "joke" so maybe I'm being too po-faced here?

Anyway...

The article isn't based on the video. I saw him talking live in Canonical's office. I follow Waage on social media and find his stuff smart and funny, but I don't watch his videos, because as a general rule I hate watching videos. This one seemed relevant and the description and the opening said it was about the same subject.

But yes -- totally recommend the lad himself, over my poor summary!

[45RPM]

Back in the day, before I got a 486, I had a 20 MHz 386. I used to play Doom on that - by shrinking the play area down to postage stamp size. More recently, and continuing the theme of using the wrong hardware for the job, I got Quake running on a 25MHz 68030 (Macintosh IIci). Although it would be hard to say that I enjoyed playing it - even shrinking the play area, it struggled to hit 5FPS.

[phuzz]

I played Doom on my Amiga 1200 back in the day, and even with a CPU expansion card, it was still generally less than 10FPS. Perhaps not the most fun experience, but it's gifted me with a lifelong tolerance to low refresh rates. When someone claims "anything under 60 FPS is literally unplayable", I smile to myself; sounds like a skill issue ;)

[45RPM]

I remember playing Flight Simulator on a 4.77MHz XT. That often hovered around 5-10 FPS. I still enjoyed it. In cyan, purple black and white. Happy days.

[John Brown (no body)]

I remember playing the original[*] version on a TRS-80 with 128x48 graphics in 8-bit Z80, 1.77MHz glory!!

That was back when it was Sublogic Flight Simulator, only pre-dated by the original version on the Apple ][ earlier the same year :-)

Probably only 4-6 FPS at best but I think it was a shade faster than the true original on the Apple ][. Of course, the Apple ][ version had far superior graphics ca[ability :-D

[45RPM]

Never tried either of those. I did have a crack at the C64 version. I crashed. Fast. With a very low frame rate if I recall correctly.

[Dan 55]

Frames per second? Luxury. I remember Driller which had a refresh rate counted in seconds per frame.

[David 132]

Pfft. I regularly playget paid to play a game called Powerpoint that is minutes per frame, or indeed hours in at least one episode of terrifying infamy.

[45RPM]

I loved Driller! I’d upgraded to a <sarcasm>mighty</sarcasm> PC1512 by that point. It felt light witchcraft to be able to explore that 3D world.

[Elongated Muskrat]

ISTR having a copy of that for the Amstrad CPC which came on a cover cassette with a copy of Amstrad Action. However, a quick search shows me that they never gave that one away, so perhaps I was playing a borrowed copy. Either way, seconds-per-frame was right; sometimes several.

[nsimic]

Lords of Midnight also needed a second or two to render the current scene

[Blackjack]

With a few tweaks it probably can run on Debian too.