DOOM Ported To Palm Pre, Is Hardware-Accelerated

Things are getting fast, huh?

Way fun stuff.

Used a joystick as well as keyboard, however, so it was a lot easier to do certain movements.

Maybe I'll try to download a version for my Ubuntu box that runs native and see if the speed is up to snuff (600MHz PIII).

It doesn't open its _own_ card so much as it starts it's own surface, and when luna realizes it has to share the fb after the initialized virtual surface, it creates a hardware accelerated surface in a new card and shoves it in there.

There's lots more, though, including telling comments from Palm themselves in the code that indicate yes, this is all for real and probably how they're going to handle gaming themselves - like, say, with Need For Speed.

Speaking of which, I need to hunt down some PR people from EA. I'm guessing we'll be wanting to talk with them post-CES...

well; its classic PR crud - in its current context.

the original game uses a framebuffer based rendering engine; so all the drawing et al is done in a memory chunk that represents the display. if this is still the case - the only "hardware acceleration" is the fact that there is a surface used for displaying it. this is no different than using an open GL texture and letting the operating system do the blitting to the actual screen. you will find it would be much faster to draw direct to the framebuffer of the device - so, in fact, its slower now.

the biggest advantage of this is that it plays nicely with everything else on the device; meaning it can be pushed to the side and you can switch in/out of applications easier. it is how it should be; but it surely isn't hardware acelerated. if the game was re-written to use open gl; and utilize the open gl directly - like what has been done on the iphone; then its hardware accelerated.

from the quote; it doesn't seem to be the case tho.

--
Aaron Ardiri
PalmOS Certified Developer

[zsoc] freakout: sdl apps are run on a surface using a framebuffer device driver which is only available when the powervr (gpu) module is installed in the kernel.

So in other words, they're using the GPU to render it, even if the game engine itself doesn't support hardware acceleration. They can also now launch multiple instances of the game in multiple cards - 5 sessions of Doom running simultaneously without much of a performance hit would seem to indicated there's hardware acceleration going on here...

The question is whether or not OpenGL is also accessible via SDL via its current webOS implementation. zsoc is currently working on porting sdlgears, which will be the test.
Sometime PIC blogger
Treo 270 --> Treo 650 --> Treo 680 --> Centro --> Pre
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But Rod was able to cook up a front-end to launch the game in Project Ares in less than an hour, and a proper launcher is already en route so there's no Terminal fussing. The sticking point is whether to make Preware the launcher - something which it's not really meant for - or whether to build a seperate SDL game launcher, because DOOM is only one of many games that can run on it. (Descent, for instance, has also been ported to SDL....)

NotTellingYou wrote:
Again..things liek "home brew" "it's not official" this sort of wild west crap is ok on my LinuX PC but NOT on a consumer phone. I call it my "mom test" if something can confuse my mom it doesn't belong on a mass market device. Why can't people get it in their heads that THIS is why Apple has found success on the phone that they didn't on the PC. People are ok with, and expect, complexity and issues like crashes and all, on their computer but they WILL NOT tolerate it on their phone. Apple, like it or not, with the locked ecosystem puts a firewall up. This would never be allowed on the iTunes store at this stage and unless Palm gets their $@%! together they will be like my Linux PC, loved by a few, but destined to be a niche player.

First of all, why would your mom want to play Doom on her cell phone?

Secondly, are you suggesting that the phone should be locked down so that people can't customize it and install what they want? Because that is what you are suggesting. Homebrew apps are not part of the Palm App Catalog and the typical user never sees them or is aware that they even exist. You might as well demand that in the interest of simplicity that Apple do everything possible to prevent people from Jailbreaking their iPhone -- oh wait, they already do that.

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Screw convergence
Palm III->Visor Deluxe->Visor Platinum->Visor Prism->Tungsten E->Palm LifeDrive->Palm TX->Palm Pre
Visor Pro+VisorPhone->Treo 180g->Treo 270->Treo 600->Treo 680->T-Mobile G1->Palm Pre
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There are Real World constraints on what can run on a phone.

Number One, of course, is the phone HAS to work as a phone with all that such a statement means.

Phone manufacturers like Palm or Apple aren't restricting access for no good reason.

They can simply blame bad software if someone crashes their phone with their unofficial application.

But they get lots of interest, they certainly get lots of free publicity, they get beta-testers out the wazoo, and they can lock things down LATER.