Doom on an Adafruit 2.8″ TFT Touch Shield and an ESP32 #ItRunsDoom
Where can’t you play Doo? Fun entry into the logs of Doom is this build from Naveen on Hackster.io. They use an Arduino Nano ESP32 to run Doom. Played with a joystick on the Adafruit 2.8″ TFT Touch Shield
The original DOOM game required at least 4MB of RAM and 20MB of disk space, which are much larger than the typical microcontroller specifications. To port the game, some compression and optimization techniques are needed to fit the game data and code into the microcontroller’s flash memory and RAM and some modifications and adaptations are needed to make the game engine run on a different platform and architecture, such as an ESP32 or RP2040 chip. However, these changes may introduce some errors or differences in the game’s behavior and performance, which may affect the gameplay experience.
Lately, there have been several efforts to make the game compatible with low-powered microcontrollers. For our project, we’ve opted to use Retro-Go, an open-source firmware that allows retro games to be played on ESP32-based MCUs. While this firmware doesn’t support Arduino Nano ESP32 directly, its flexibility and configurability make it possible to be ported to other ESP32-based MCUs.
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