They manage to run doom on a basic cell phone
Doom has given to talk again and it is that in this article we will talk about a new project with this game that has managed to reach places that one would never have thought. And it is that thanks to the effort and creativity of many programmers, the expression "If it has a screen, it has Doom" has been taken to its maximum expression.
The project that we will talk about today is part of the FPDoom project and in which the novelty is that a port of Doom for basic phones based on the Spreadtrum SC6531 chip.
For those who don't know about Doom, they should know that It is considered one of the pioneering first-person shooter video games. by introducing, in the age of IBM compatible computers, novel features such as 3D graphics, XNUMXD spatiality, multiplayer network play, and mod support
Doom's source code was released to the public on December 23, 1997. Although Doom was originally created for DOS, the release was of the Linux version and the source code had to be ported back to DOS and other operating systems.
Source code was originally published under a proprietary license which prohibited commercial use and did not require developers to provide source code for modifications they published in executable form. As of today, most Doom source ports are open source.. The GNU GPL requires authors who use GPL code in their software to also release the modified source code.
The idea of bringing Doom to these teams is due to to the more modifications of the Spreadtrum SC6531 chip and above all that these take up roughly a lot of basic phone market in China, Russia and other countries.
The chip is based on the ARM926EJ-S processor. with a frequency of 208 MHz (SC6531E) or 312 MHz (SC6531DA), the architecture of the ARMv5TEJ processor. And although it all sounds too good, it is mentioned that the port has a high degree of porting complexity and that it is due to the following factors:
- There are no third party apps available on these phones.
- Small amount of RAM: only 4MB (brands/vendors often list this as 32MB, but this is misleading as they are referring to megabits, not megabytes).
- Documentation closed (you can only find a leak from an older and lower version), so a lot was extracted using the reverse engineering method.
For the moment, only a small part of the chip has been investigated: USB, screen and keys, so you can only play on a phone connected to a computer with a USB cable (resources for the game are transferred from the computer), and there is also no sound in the game.
In its current form, the game is released on 6 out of 9 tested phones based on the SC6531 chip.
How to install Doom on SC6531?
For Interested in testing the project?, you can follow the build instructions that are shared in the following link
To put this chip in boot mode, you need to know which key to hold during boot (for the F+F256 model this is the “*” key, for Digma LINX B241 – the “middle” key, for F+Ezzy 4 – the «1» key, for Vertex M115 – «up», for Joy's S21 and Vertex C323 – «0»).
To run the game it is mentioned to create a working directory workdir and place the Doom resource file there, for example doom1.wad from the shareware version of Doom 1.
After that, the following commands must be executed in a script and then connect the phone:
./spd_dump --wait 300 fdl nor_fdl1.bin 0x40004000 fdl fpdoom.bin ram cd workdir && ../libc_server -- --bright 50 --rotate 3 doom
--bright X is the brightness of the phone screen (X = 0..100).
--rotate S[,K] is the screen/keyboard rotation in units of 90 degrees (-1 or 3 = -90, 1 = +90, etc.)
It is mentioned that all the LCD screens of this type of phones are vertical, so if your device has a horizontal screen, that means it is a vertical LCD screen placed horizontally, so different S and K values should be used.
In addition to this you can add additional options for Doom, for example doom -timedemo demo1.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it about this port, as well as the list of compatible models, you can check the details In the following link.