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?
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.
can it be rewritten to use fixed point arithmetic instead?
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.
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.
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.
That’s only because everything can run Doom now.