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Doom playing full screen at 50FPS on a Commodore64
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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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Mildly Interesting
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Having recently started doing lightweight programming on my c64 this was very questionable to me, especially considering the Amiga (the much more powerful followon to c64 couldn't even get close to this level of performance).
Following the mastadon link revealed the secret:
"@electron_greg This is incredibly impressive! What kind of wizardry is this? There's no way this is running on a stock C64. I assume it's using an accelerator of some kind but I don't see anything sticking out of the cartridge port..."
"Correct. It is equipped with a "RAD" cartridge which is effectively a co-pro in the form of a RaspberryPi Zero."
So the heavy lifting is being done by the Raspberry Pi's ARM CPU, not the c64, which is I'm guessing is essentially being used as a fancy frame buffer to display the Raspberry Pi's output.
This is still REALLY impressive though to be able to interface the two this way, and I'm glad to see this. Well done electron_greg!
Yeah, this definitely doesn’t count as running on a c64.
I was so shocked first! Back when I was a kid I was super hyped when a Hungarian team had announced that they would make a Doom knockoff called Boom! I bought the game as soon as I could, and while I still played it a good bunch, I was a bit disappointed that it was basically an old RPG style 90-degree-turns-only, central projection kind of shooter with mostly static (non-moving) sprites and joystick aiming. And that was pretty much all that they could squeeze out of the hardware, spread over several floppy disks.
Since the map was mesh/cell based, and every enemy was in the center of one cell, it was faster to just turn-move-turn-move-turn and shoot with a centered crosshair than aiming with your constant speed joystick.
Even THAT game had serious frame rate limitations, so I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the gif.
If you're looking for an honest-to-goodness running on C64 hardware FPS experience that is as close to Wolfenstein 3D/Doom that we've seen so far, there is a really impressive demo from jimi9757 where he made a ray casting engine for c64. You can see that here.
Perhaps even more impressive is he made a version for the Commodore PET too.
Holy mackerel, this is cool! Thanks! I also played Total Eclipse, which was a bit closer to being 3D (and Stunt Car Racer!), but this jimo stuff seems to run much faster.