Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.
I can sort of see one angle for it, and the parent story kind of supports it. Bad software is a forcing function for good hardware - the worse that software has gotten in the past few decades the better hardware has had to get to support it. Such that if you actually tried like OP did, you can do some pretty crazy things on tiny hardware these days. Imagine what we could do on computers if they weren't so bottlenecked doing things they don't need to do.
Or a third option - an economic success that economies of scale have made massively capable hardware the cheapest option for many applications, despite being overkill.
Neither - it's a triumph of our ability to do increasing complex things in both software and hardware. An earbud should be able to make good use of the extra computing capacity, whether it is to run more sophisticated compression saving bandwidth, or for features like more sophisticated noise cancelling/microphone isolation algorithms. There are really very few devices that shouldn't be able to be better given more (free) compute.
It's also a triumph of the previous generation of programmers to be able to make interesting games that took so little compute.
Plus there’s actually less waste, I would imagine, by using a generic, very efficiently mass produced, but way overkill part. vs. a one off or very specific, rare but perfectly matched part.
It's already very cheap to build though. We are able to pack a ton of processing into a tiny form factor for little money (comparatively, ignoring end-consumer margins etc.).
An earbud that does ANC, supports multiple different audio standard including low battery standby, is somewhat resistant to interference, can send and receive over many meters. That's awesome for the the price. That it has enough processing to run a 33 year old game.. well, that's just technological progression.
A single modern smartphone has more compute than all global conpute of 1980 combined.
Earbuds often have features like mic beam forming and noise cancellation which require a substantial degree of processing power. It's hardly unjustified compared to your Teams instance making fans spin or Home Assistant bringing down an RPi to its knees.
No doubt, maybe should I have emphasised the "general" part of "general purpose" more. Not a hardware person myself, I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.
It's absolute bonkers amount of hardware scaling that happened since Doom was released. Yes, this is a tremendous overkill here, but the crazy part here is that this fits into an earpiece.
I remember playing Doom on a single-core 25MHz 486 laptop. It was, at the time, an amazing machine, hundreds of times more powerful than the flight computer that ran the Apollo space capsule, and now it is outclassed by an earbud.
Hi, I ported DOOM to the Pinebuds Pro earbuds.
It's accessible over the internet, so you can join the queue and play DOOM on my earbuds from your PC!
More info as well as links to the github repos can be found on the site.
On a tangent: I remember reading John Carmak saying that as game engines became more complex, he had to relinquish the idea of writing all the (engine) code himself, and start to rely on other folks contributions as well (this was in an interview after the release of Doom 3).
John is now on a mission to make AGI a reality. I’d say given his own investment there, he’s probably positive about it.
Just speculation on my part of course.
Also, “masters of doom” is such a good book. Recommend it for anyone who wants to peek behind the scenes of how Carmack, Romero, and iD software built Doom (and Wolf3D etc).
> Earbuds don't have displays, so the only way to transfer data to/from them is either via bluetooth, or the UART contact pads.
Bluetooth is pretty slow, you'd be lucky to get a consistent 1mbps connection, UART is easily the better option.
Does this means you can run a doom instance on each bud? Is it viable to make a distributed app to use the computing power of both buds at once?
This was a stretch goal, multiplayer. One earbuds versus the other. It's not that hard to implement but I've got a few other things to clear away first.
Using them for distributed computation though? interesting use of free will xD
Now ... I played the game when I was young. It was addictive. I don't
think it was a good game but it was addictive. And somewhat simple.
So what is the problem then? Well ... games have gotten a lot bigger,
often more complicated. Trying to port that to small platforms is
close to impossible. This makes me sad. I think the industry, excluding
indie tech/startups, totally lost the focus here. The games that are
now en vogue, do not interest me at all. Sometimes they have interesting
ideas - I liked little nightmares here - but they are huge and very
different from the older games. And often much more boring too.
One of my favourite DOS games was master of orion 1 for instance. I
could, despite its numerous flaws, play that again and again and
again. Master of Orion 2 was not bad either, but it was nowhere near
as addictive and the gameplay was also more convoluted and slower.
(Sometimes semi-new games are also ok such as Warcraft 3. I am not
saying ALL new games are bad, but it seems as if games were kind of
dumbed down to be more like a video to watch, with semi-few interactive
elements as you watch it. That's IMO not really a game. And just
XP grinding for the big bad wolf to scale to the next level, deal
out more damage, as your HP grows ... that's not really playing
either. That's just wasting your time.)
It's Doom in part because it's a significantly popular game, that was open sourced, with low resource requirements (but not too low to be trivial), with an innovative custom engine that people find interesting, originally created by a person who many respect or admired growing up, and the game itself is cool. And now there is enough inertia to keep choosing it.
Most people don't realize that games were small back then because they had to be.
The value of being small for most users almost doesn't exist. If you have bandwidth limits then yeah download size is important but most don't.
So the only meaningful change optimizations make is "will it run well enough" and "does it fit on my disk".
Put more plainly "if it works at all it doesn't matter" is how most consumers (probably correctly) treat performance optimizations/installation size.
The sacrifices you talk about were made at explicit request of consumers. Games have to be "long enough" and the difference between enough game loop and grinding is a taste thing. Games have to be "pretty" and for better or worse stylized takes effort and is a taste thing (see Wind Waker) while fancy high res lighting engines are generally recognized as good.
I will say though while being made by indies means they are optimized terribly the number of stylized short games is phenomenally high it can just be hard to find them.
Especially since it is difficult for an hour or two game to be as impactful as a similar length movie so they tend to not be brought up as frequently.
The Puya PY32 series MCUs found in most vapes have 3kb of RAM and 24kb of ROM, whereas Doom requires at least 4MB of RAM. Assuming Moore's law also applies to the computing power inside a disposable vape, we should be seeing that post in around a decade :)
Good catch!
Though it misses my primary condition: "disposable" - ha! :-D
(this one is a refillable one, and it looks like he is streaming the content from his PC?)
How are the PineBuds Pro, anyone have them? The Pine64 IRC network doesn't have a channel for PineBuds discussion so I haven't had an easy opportunity to ask.
To be honest, I've never actually used them for their intended purpose.
No idea what the comfort or audio quality is like.
There's a Pinebuds channel on the Pine64 discord, you can ask questions there :)
Whenever I see another supposedly menial device including enough general purpose hardware to run Doom, I wonder whether I should think of that as a triumph of software over hardware or an economic failure to build cheaper purpose-built hardware for things like sending audio over a radio.
Incredible to see people try to spin the wild successes of market based economies as an economic failure.
Hardware is cheap and small enough that we can run doom on an earbud, and I’m supposed to think this is a bad thing?
I can sort of see one angle for it, and the parent story kind of supports it. Bad software is a forcing function for good hardware - the worse that software has gotten in the past few decades the better hardware has had to get to support it. Such that if you actually tried like OP did, you can do some pretty crazy things on tiny hardware these days. Imagine what we could do on computers if they weren't so bottlenecked doing things they don't need to do.
Or a third option - an economic success that economies of scale have made massively capable hardware the cheapest option for many applications, despite being overkill.
Also see: USB 3+ e-marker chips. I'm still waiting for a Doom port on those.
Neither - it's a triumph of our ability to do increasing complex things in both software and hardware. An earbud should be able to make good use of the extra computing capacity, whether it is to run more sophisticated compression saving bandwidth, or for features like more sophisticated noise cancelling/microphone isolation algorithms. There are really very few devices that shouldn't be able to be better given more (free) compute.
It's also a triumph of the previous generation of programmers to be able to make interesting games that took so little compute.
Plus there’s actually less waste, I would imagine, by using a generic, very efficiently mass produced, but way overkill part. vs. a one off or very specific, rare but perfectly matched part.
There are enough atoms in that earbud to replace all of the world's computers.
We've got a long way to go.
It's already very cheap to build though. We are able to pack a ton of processing into a tiny form factor for little money (comparatively, ignoring end-consumer margins etc.).
An earbud that does ANC, supports multiple different audio standard including low battery standby, is somewhat resistant to interference, can send and receive over many meters. That's awesome for the the price. That it has enough processing to run a 33 year old game.. well, that's just technological progression.
A single modern smartphone has more compute than all global conpute of 1980 combined.
Earbuds often have features like mic beam forming and noise cancellation which require a substantial degree of processing power. It's hardly unjustified compared to your Teams instance making fans spin or Home Assistant bringing down an RPi to its knees.
No doubt, maybe should I have emphasised the "general" part of "general purpose" more. Not a hardware person myself, I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.
> CPU: Dual-core 300MHz ARM Cortex-M4F
It's absolute bonkers amount of hardware scaling that happened since Doom was released. Yes, this is a tremendous overkill here, but the crazy part here is that this fits into an earpiece.
I remember playing Doom on a single-core 25MHz 486 laptop. It was, at the time, an amazing machine, hundreds of times more powerful than the flight computer that ran the Apollo space capsule, and now it is outclassed by an earbud.
If it can run Doom it can run malware.
Hi, I ported DOOM to the Pinebuds Pro earbuds. It's accessible over the internet, so you can join the queue and play DOOM on my earbuds from your PC! More info as well as links to the github repos can be found on the site.
On a tangent: I remember reading John Carmak saying that as game engines became more complex, he had to relinquish the idea of writing all the (engine) code himself, and start to rely on other folks contributions as well (this was in an interview after the release of Doom 3).
I wonder what his feelings are in this age of AI.
Carmak made extensive use of AI during Doom development: Approximate Interpolation.
John is now on a mission to make AGI a reality. I’d say given his own investment there, he’s probably positive about it.
Just speculation on my part of course.
Also, “masters of doom” is such a good book. Recommend it for anyone who wants to peek behind the scenes of how Carmack, Romero, and iD software built Doom (and Wolf3D etc).
List of Doom ports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doom_ports
A few more years and some more ram on these earbuds and we'll be able to run some nice local earbud kubernetes clusters
> Earbuds don't have displays, so the only way to transfer data to/from them is either via bluetooth, or the UART contact pads. Bluetooth is pretty slow, you'd be lucky to get a consistent 1mbps connection, UART is easily the better option.
Does this means you can run a doom instance on each bud? Is it viable to make a distributed app to use the computing power of both buds at once?
This was a stretch goal, multiplayer. One earbuds versus the other. It's not that hard to implement but I've got a few other things to clear away first.
Using them for distributed computation though? interesting use of free will xD
I am a bit said that it is always Doom.
Now ... I played the game when I was young. It was addictive. I don't think it was a good game but it was addictive. And somewhat simple.
So what is the problem then? Well ... games have gotten a lot bigger, often more complicated. Trying to port that to small platforms is close to impossible. This makes me sad. I think the industry, excluding indie tech/startups, totally lost the focus here. The games that are now en vogue, do not interest me at all. Sometimes they have interesting ideas - I liked little nightmares here - but they are huge and very different from the older games. And often much more boring too.
One of my favourite DOS games was master of orion 1 for instance. I could, despite its numerous flaws, play that again and again and again. Master of Orion 2 was not bad either, but it was nowhere near as addictive and the gameplay was also more convoluted and slower.
(Sometimes semi-new games are also ok such as Warcraft 3. I am not saying ALL new games are bad, but it seems as if games were kind of dumbed down to be more like a video to watch, with semi-few interactive elements as you watch it. That's IMO not really a game. And just XP grinding for the big bad wolf to scale to the next level, deal out more damage, as your HP grows ... that's not really playing either. That's just wasting your time.)
It's Doom in part because it's a significantly popular game, that was open sourced, with low resource requirements (but not too low to be trivial), with an innovative custom engine that people find interesting, originally created by a person who many respect or admired growing up, and the game itself is cool. And now there is enough inertia to keep choosing it.
I wish there were more ports of Duke Nukem 3D :(
Most people don't realize that games were small back then because they had to be.
The value of being small for most users almost doesn't exist. If you have bandwidth limits then yeah download size is important but most don't.
So the only meaningful change optimizations make is "will it run well enough" and "does it fit on my disk".
Put more plainly "if it works at all it doesn't matter" is how most consumers (probably correctly) treat performance optimizations/installation size.
The sacrifices you talk about were made at explicit request of consumers. Games have to be "long enough" and the difference between enough game loop and grinding is a taste thing. Games have to be "pretty" and for better or worse stylized takes effort and is a taste thing (see Wind Waker) while fancy high res lighting engines are generally recognized as good.
I will say though while being made by indies means they are optimized terribly the number of stylized short games is phenomenally high it can just be hard to find them.
Especially since it is difficult for an hour or two game to be as impactful as a similar length movie so they tend to not be brought up as frequently.
Im with you. I want to play Freespace 2 on earbuds.
Im waiting for the post "Doom ported to disposable Vape chip" :-D
The Puya PY32 series MCUs found in most vapes have 3kb of RAM and 24kb of ROM, whereas Doom requires at least 4MB of RAM. Assuming Moore's law also applies to the computing power inside a disposable vape, we should be seeing that post in around a decade :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVsvtEj9iqE
Good catch! Though it misses my primary condition: "disposable" - ha! :-D (this one is a refillable one, and it looks like he is streaming the content from his PC?)
But a very cool link, thanks for sharing! :)
The standalone viewer (connected directly to the earbuds) also works on mobile: https://files.catbox.moe/pdvphj.mp4
No touch controls though, it just plays the intro loop
How are the PineBuds Pro, anyone have them? The Pine64 IRC network doesn't have a channel for PineBuds discussion so I haven't had an easy opportunity to ask.
To be honest, I've never actually used them for their intended purpose. No idea what the comfort or audio quality is like. There's a Pinebuds channel on the Pine64 discord, you can ask questions there :)
Was using them just this morning. I've been using them since they are out. Great device but battery is quite limited, ~2hrs top with ANC on.
I'm also curious. I used to be a big supporter of Pine64 but the e-ink tablet and phone debacles have kinda soured me on them.
We should definitely send a playable copy of doom to aliens on a golden record on the next Voyager mission
Do we have Doom on a USB-C plug microcontroller yet?
Disposable Vape CPU!
At first I thought you found a way to control/view the game acoustically and I was very curious how that worked.
But, this probably makes more sense.
This is awesome! the amount of devices doom has not been run on shrinks by the day haha
In light of this I propose "Doom's Law" as the ultimate expression of late stage capitalism:
- Society continues to produce more and more powerful devices.
- More and more of these devices begin running Doom.
- When this reaches the saturation point, society becomes Doom.
Relevant SMBC, "Computer scientist vs computer engineer": https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-17
can we run doom on water pump?