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[–] 96 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

The port is here: https://github.com/alexkid77/openlara_esp32p4
and the author's name is Alejandro Villegas Alonso.

But because he posted a video of his project on YouTube, PCGamer reduces him to the name of the platform he posted on: "YouTuber."

The author of this article will henceforth be referred to as "PCGamerer."

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  • [–] 30 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    hardware creator Alejandro Villegas Alonso shared a clip of classic Tomb Raider running from a low-power chip

    He’s fully credited in the article text. Perfectly normal to not give a full name in a title unless they’re a well known public figure (and even then it’s often shortened to one name if possible).

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  • [–] 30 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Yeah but YouTuber is a weird way to describe someone just because that’s where you saw their project. His account has 200 subscribers. He could equally be referred to as a GitHubber or Linkediner.

    Personally i would have just said “engineer” or “programmer.”

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  • [–] 31 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

    Lol I've got a esp32-p4 and I struggled to get the included example working. So. We're basically the same.

    It's a very impressive chip but Tomb Raider, wow that's fantastic

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  • [–] 7 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

    I wonder about the graphics arrangement? An ESP32 doesn't usually have video out.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    You can drive screen output via the gpio pins quite easily. You can even do VGA output via I²S!

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  • The esp-32s are a thing of wonder. Love them for building random shit.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    Old rombus boobs is back in 2026

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  • [–] 9 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    Microcontrollers have gotten sooo powerful. I started out using 16 MHz arduinos but today my favorite one (Teensy 4.0/4.1) runs at 600 MHz and can be over clocked to 1 GHz.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

    Solar panel ambulance gamers in their down time.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

    a 32 bit dual core cpu is probably way more powerful than the low-mhz scale one it originally ran on?

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  • [–] 13 points 3 weeks ago* (2 children)

    Tomb raider 1996 was a primary title for the Sega Saturn which used hitachi superH 32bit RISC processors at 28mhz and 2m RAM. A little more digging lists the minimum PC requirements for the DOS/win9x version to be a Pentium 60 and 8m RAM.

    Not even counting that overall instructions per clock has increased tremendously since the 90s, yeah, there's plenty of power in an esp32 at 400mhz lol

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago*

    The ESP32 seems to even do more MIPS per Mhz that the original Pentium, so it's even faster than a 400mhz pentium would be. Computationally at least

    Edit: apparently the Pentium was actually much faster at 64-bit floating point calculations (ESP32 has to do 2 32-bit operations and combine in software), but I don't think that's an issue here

    Guess it depends on how tomb raider was written. Even on 32-bit CPUs games like quake were still doing 64-bit math

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    This reminds me of very early mobile ports of this game for Pocket PC PDAs from 2002.

    Allow me to geek out a little: The two least powerful of the officially supported devices - Compaq iPAQ 3630 and Toshiba e310 - feature a 32bit ARM-based RISC CPU clocked at 206 MHz, paired with 32 MB of RAM and a 240 x 320 display. The Toshiba cost $899 when it came out in October of 2002, equivalent to $1661 in today's money (in other words, way too much for a kid who desperately wanted one back then).

    Here's the interesting part though: This CPU - the Intel StrongARM SA-1110 (yes, Intel used to license ARM CPUs)- has a TDP of less than 400 mW when clocked at 206 MHz. This is without RAM, of course, but still, this was a very power-efficient chip for the time - and it could take up tasks that were usually done by other chips, like acting as a softmodem.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    Why is the processor 32 bit though, instead of 64?

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