From printers to calculators, hacking various gadgets to run the classic first-person shooter Doom has long been a staple of the modding community and a way to strut one’s technical prowess. Years later, as embedded devices have grown exceedingly capable (at least by the standards of running a 25 year old game), the new benchmark game is shaping up to be Valve’s Half-Life. Modder Dave Bennet has successfully managed to run the seminal PC game Half-Life off of an LG G Watch.
While the smartwatch features a quadcore Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8226 with an Adreno 305 GPU — significantly beefier hardware than Half-Life ’s 1997 system requirements — it can only run Half-Life off of a single-core Cortex-A7 CPU core since multi-threading wasn’t available back when Value originally programmed the game. By and large, this is amended by the fact that the Snapdragon’s maximum clock speed of 1,200 MHz far surpasses Half-Life’s recommend 800 MHz as does the DirectX 9-enabled Adreno 305 GPU.
Running the actual game relies on the SDLash application to emulate Half-Life ’s original engine, but even with hardware that surpasses the original Pentium III and Voodoo 2 required to run game, it’s performance is questionable at best, ping ponging between as high as 46 frames per second to as low as 2 FPS. The issue is clearly not hardware related, but something to with the emulator bottling the MSM8226’s performance.
But let’s be honest, playing Half-Life on a 1.65-inch screen is utterly impossible, even if the screen features a touch-responsive wrapper. The minimum screen-size to emulate on-screen controls such as movement and aiming has got to be at least four inches, a 1.65-inch screen is nothing sort of a novelty. Take it as a proof-of-concept until the day when wearables have received a miniaturized hand-me down from the technology currently driving our PCs.
Nonetheless, this is Half-Life on our wrists we’re taking about — that’s unquestionably awesome!
Source: ExtremeTech
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