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Toon app: Doom4toon.

Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2017 1:11 am
by marcelr
Just finished a small fun project. A few months ago, anandus of the tweakers forum asked if playing Doom on Toon were possible.
( https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/li ... 9#52169739 )

Just for fun, I did some digging into code for doom, and to cut a long story short, yes, it can be done.
The result is shown in this video:
http://files.domoticaforum.eu/uploads/T ... m4toon.avi
It shows just the demo mode, can't play and record video simultaneously, haven't got enough hands for that. The whole exercise has taught me quite a lot on the inner workings of the frame buffer code, and the underlying stack. You never know what it's useful for in the future.

The port required a revised linux kernel for toon (with USB keyboard/mouse support), a port of libSDL for framebuffer devices, libSDL_mixer (for sound that's not really working), and libSDL_net (for multiplayer games, one toon against another :-) ).
The doom version of choice was chocolate-doom, version 2.3.0. This is a doom version written in C, with SDL graphics, and a fairly small footprint.
To get everything going, the doom code required a fair amount of patching, to fill some gaps left by the toon port of SDL. I just picked up a .wad file from the internet, somewhere, to get the scenery working.

All quby code was switched off (not removed; two small edits are enough to stop your thermostat from being a thermostat). As a side product, this left a whopping 110MB of free RAM. In normal mode, toon has less than 15 MB free when it's up and running, WITHOUT any of the apps from this forum.

Is it any good? I played this game against one of my colleagues, during lunch breaks, back in 1997, with two 486's against each other with a null modem cable in between. Performance then was good, as far as I can remember. The ARM 926EJS of toon has more computational power than a 486, so yes, performance is not an issue. The screen is a bit small, though.

I played the game all the way to the end, back then, won't do it again :-).

Re: Toon app: Doom4toon.

Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2017 10:42 am
by Toonz
Haha, back to the future..... Great stuff!!!!!!

Re: Toon app: Doom4toon.

Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2017 11:31 am
by ams123
great nice work

Re: Toon app: Doom4toon.

Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2017 4:18 pm
by fkruis
:)

Re: Toon app: Doom4toon.

Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2017 7:55 pm
by Sjoek
Great, that's some old school game!

Re: Toon app: Doom4toon.

Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2018 7:24 pm
by marcelr
Old school game for not-so-very-bleeding-edge hardware :-)

Re: Toon app: Doom4toon.

Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2018 8:35 pm
by Sjoek
indeed marcelr,

I think i was running it on my 486 dx2 33mhz, with a whopping 16mb of memory :lol: :lol:
In the days that was a lot of computing power :D