Mathias Claussen's Guide Puts Quake on Your RISC-V Microcontroller — on the Game's 25th Birthday
What brought gaming PCs to their knees back in 1996 can now run on a microcontroller — albeit a surprisingly powerful one.
Mathias Claussen has put together a guide to running classic first-person shooter Quake on a low-cost RISC-V microcontroller board, on the week of the game's 25th birthday.
Released back on 22 June 1996, id Software's Quake was a game-changer. Building on the success of Doom, Quake switched to a new engine with true three-dimensional capabilities — and the inclusion of multiplayer plus a soundtrack by Trent Reznor did nothing to hurt its popularity.
Like Doom before it, Quake has become more than a game. With id Software releasing the source code to its game engines under open-source licenses as it moves to new engines, Quake is often picked for porting to new platforms — including microcontrollers.
"The Canaan Kendryte K210 is an inexpensive microcontroller with a RISC-V core," Claussen writes in his latest guide. "It can be found on the Sipeed Maixduino board or the Sipeed Maix Bit, as well as on other boards and can be purchased as a kit with camera and LCD for about €30 (around $36.)"
"While Quake 1 is not to everyone’s taste as far as games go, this game demonstrates the power of the microcontroller. With the SDK and compiler set up, Quake 1 and the first Hello World can now be compiled. This provides a development environment for further experiments with the K210 and source code from which you can see how the periphery of the K210 is controlled."
Claussen's guide, which builds on a port originally created by pseudonymous developer Gombe, is now available to read on the Elektor Magazine website.