Good to see I'm not the only weirdo still using Midnight Commander.
unethicalinfo 4 hours ago [-]
Cool write up, getting initial bill shock from 2 layer to the 4+ layer PCBs is a rite of passage :)
xracy 3 hours ago [-]
This is really cool and impressive... but relatedly...
Has anyone figured out what the minimum specs for Quake are?
I feel like the first thing everyone does with a computer is to determine whether or not it can run quake, and I'm just wondering what the like, most simple computer that could exist is, that could run quake?
klodolph 2 hours ago [-]
You can find a lot of discussion about what the minimum specs for Quake are. Famously, it needs a decent FPU, and the Pentium was a convenient early CPU with a decent built-in FPU. It was significantly faster than a 486.
…But people have managed to run Quake on the 486.
And the myth people tell about Quake is that it killed Cyrix, because Quake performance on Cyrix was subpar. But was that true? And if it was true, was that because the Cyrix was slower than a Pentium, or was it because the Quake code had assembly that was hand-optimized for the Pentium FPU pipeline?
Anyway. “Most simple computer that could run Quake” is probably going to include a decent FPU. If you are implementing something on an FPGA, you can probably get somewhere around 200 MHz clock anyway. At which point you can run Quake II.
NooneAtAll3 1 hours ago [-]
can it be rewritten to use fixed point arithmetic instead?
klodolph 17 minutes ago [-]
I want to look at this from a different perspective… a single-precision floating-point multiply is pretty simple, no? 24x24 bit multiply, which is about half as many gates as a 32x32 bit multiply.
Maybe I would prefer to rip out the integer multiplication unit first, before ripping out the FPU.
Narishma 1 hours ago [-]
The PS1 doesn't an FPU but got a version of Quake 2, so it's possible. That said, it was somewhat different from the PC version, so it could be argued that it's not the same game.
klodolph 46 minutes ago [-]
The PS1 version definitely has its own engine, which is not just a port of the Quake 2 engine to the Playstation, but a new engine.
conception 2 hours ago [-]
That’s only because everything can run Doom now.
bee_rider 2 hours ago [-]
Quake 2 was the one with the clever approximate inverse square root code, right? I wonder (especially since there’s an instruction nowadays to draw inspiration from), can you implement it “in hardware,” so to speak?
BoredPositron 34 minutes ago [-]
No that was Q3 Arena.
absynth 5 minutes ago [-]
Another board has become Frag complete. Important milestone!
markus_zhang 4 hours ago [-]
This is very impressive. How did you learn to design a real computer, not the toy ones a lot of people made? I read part 1 and part 2 and looks like you just “thrown in” Ethernet and other stuffs and it was done. Really hope to learn from the process, thanks!
2 hours ago [-]
argulane 3 days ago [-]
That's some mad dedication to go from kicad schematics to running Quake. Very impressive!
tkapin 28 minutes ago [-]
Very impressive project!
klodolph 2 hours ago [-]
The diagonal traces and the empty spaces are throwing me for a loop. Is this the autorouter in action? (But… still, nice work.)
I have the album on my phone. When I get called in to put out a fire and save the day, I like to put on March Of The Stroggs in the car when arriving at the destination. It's a great soundtrack for two reasons - the first one is sweet, wasted youth and the second is it's a great soundtrack.
Rendered at 02:37:46 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Has anyone figured out what the minimum specs for Quake are?
I feel like the first thing everyone does with a computer is to determine whether or not it can run quake, and I'm just wondering what the like, most simple computer that could exist is, that could run quake?
…But people have managed to run Quake on the 486.
And the myth people tell about Quake is that it killed Cyrix, because Quake performance on Cyrix was subpar. But was that true? And if it was true, was that because the Cyrix was slower than a Pentium, or was it because the Quake code had assembly that was hand-optimized for the Pentium FPU pipeline?
Anyway. “Most simple computer that could run Quake” is probably going to include a decent FPU. If you are implementing something on an FPGA, you can probably get somewhere around 200 MHz clock anyway. At which point you can run Quake II.
Maybe I would prefer to rip out the integer multiplication unit first, before ripping out the FPU.
https://youtu.be/Zdy9TtInX-c
Lots of Quake II samples.