How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA

Shockingly enough it is actually possible to do decent ray casting and much more on the GBA despite the incredibly minimal compute budget.

Joshua Barretto has been working on a GBA port of Super Mario 64 with entire 3D levels, characters, and movements. In my opinion just incredible work:

https://youtu.be/9mUsgJ-HiDM

The one that blew my mind as a kid was Need for speed underground:

https://youtu.be/36U2xN-196c?si=T7xSCeKxss_at3S0

I distinctly remember Spider-Man 2 on GBA having a 3D overworld. It was my first introduction to the concept of "low framerate" in a videogame haha. Incredible what people were capable of doing with the hardware back then.

There was actually a fully 3d platformer released for the system during it's production run, Asterix & Obelix XXL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0pknb4ghUA

I'm more impressed with the song "Get Low" ending up in an E-rated game.

In my opinion, the most impressive 3D game for the GBA is still the unfinished port of Quake by Randy Linden:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=R43k-p9XdIk

Amazing - a purely software rasterizer on 16MHz, no floating point, 16-bit data bus, at most 512k of RAM? That’s the original 68k! What’s everyone’s excuse for not getting SM64 running on a Macintosh Plus?

I guess you're probably joking, but in case there's any actual confusion:

ARM7 is fully pipelined, and GBA connects it to 32K of on-chip zero-wait-state SRAM, so it's possible for optimized code to approach 16 MIPS with 32-bit operations. The original 68K is a multi-cycle processor and Mac Plus runs it at 8 MHz, which tops out at more like 2 MIPS for 16-bit operations, less for 32-bit operations (the ALUs are only 16-bit).

The one that blew my mind was Payback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wApAbxZY9k

It's GTA1/2 clone with an overhead view of a full 3D world.

That SM64 port is incredible, thank you for sharing it!

There was also a Tomb Raider port (and probably other examples of the genre).