
Wolfenstein 3D – Gameboy cartridge with co-processor - phoboslab
http://www.happydaze.se/wolf/
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aresant
This guy's combo of hardware and software engineering is stunning.

That he then has the aesthetic capability to knock out a beautiful fucking box
for the cartridge is just humbling.

~~~
erik
While this whole project certainly is incredible, the box he created is a
remix of existing art and design work:

[http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/564603-wolfenstein-3d/images/1456...](http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/564603-wolfenstein-3d/images/145697)

[http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=File:Wolfenstein_3...](http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=File:Wolfenstein_3D_-
_GBA_-_USA.jpg)

~~~
nsxwolf
Yeah well I wouldn't even be able to make a blank cardboard box.

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intopieces
An interesting reminder of what we lose when we extend copyrights ad
infinitum.

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zokier
Wolfenstein in still under copyright. This project would not be lost because
of extended copyright law.

~~~
intopieces
The original length of copyright in the United States was 14 years plus an
optional 14 year extension.

The first Wolfenstein game was released in 1981.

~~~
digi_owl
I think 80-81 was when USA signed the Bern convention that defined copyright
as life+50 for authors (when assigned to corporations it has a fixed duration
of, iirc, 90 years).

But the Bern convention also have a stipulation that all signatories have to
respect the duration of the initial nation of publication, and that can be
longer than the minimum terms of the convention agreement.

Thus you get a ratcheting effect where multinationals will try to convince
national governments to up their copyright terms to be "more competitive".

A kind of inverse to the race to the bottom that they first did on taxes
between US states (leading to Delaware being the state to file your
incorporation in), and has since applied across the globe under the banner of
competition.

BTW, there is a claim that Lord of the Rings became popular because a US
publisher thought he didn't need to respect Tolkien's UK copyright when
publishing a cheap paperback. At the time USA had not yet signed the Bern
convention.

Frankly it seems like a historic pattern where a industrial nation will begin
to slow down, try to shore up its economy by using IP laws, and another nation
coming along and ignoring those laws to bootstrap their own industry, and then
repeating the patterns some decades down the road.

So far the changeover has been UK to USA to China. And you can basically see
China trying to clamp down on their lax IP adherence right now.

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agumonkey
Just my kind of things. That sort of retrofuturism, patching the old with just
enough new to make it sexy.

Serious kudos.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Wolfenstein 3D predates the Gameboy Color by six years (1992 and 1998
respectively), and was officially ported to the SNES in 1994, the Gameboy's
contemporary TV video gaming console, so this isn't retrofutristic at all.

~~~
agumonkey
Well well well, both have a Z80 (half clock though) of late 70s design thank
you.

~~~
nsxwolf
SNES did not have a Z80.

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n-gauge
Amazing - I still don't fully understand how you manage to do rays on a tile
based system, with so many textures to account for...

~~~
mmastrac
I'm just guessing here, but it looks like the two processors share SRAM and
the beefy ARM processor draws the scene and writes it as tiles to SRAM. The
Z80 reads the tiles from SRAM and blits them to the screen.

Basically you have an ARM processor doing a whole lot of work, and a Z80 in
charge of moving it around and drawing supporting UI.

~~~
DSMan195276
That's basically right. He does some fancy stuff like DMA from the cartridge
to VRAM to make it fast enough, but basically he just copies each frame into
memory on the CGB and then swaps the background being displayed to make it
appear. It takes two V-Blanks to copy an entire frame, so it runs at 30 FPS
(While the CGB runs at about 60FPS).

~~~
logicallee
I've invited the author to this thread since it seems several people are
guessing/assuming what he is doing, plus I'm sure they'd like to know the
great reaction they got here :)

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artursapek
Starfox had a 3D co-processor too!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX)

Nintendo really pulled off some impressive feats back in those days.

~~~
eumoria
wasn't actually Nintendo that made the SuperFX chip it was Argonaut Games
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonaut_Games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonaut_Games)
who developed it

They originally codenamed it the Mathematical Argonaut Rotation I/O, or
“MARIO”, as is printed on the chip's surface.

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mortenjorck
It's crazy to remember that the GBC lacked even Mode 7, of which something
comparable wouldn't come to Nintendo handhelds until the Game Boy Advance. A
full raycaster running on the Color, at a high frame rate no less, is a very
strange sight.

I wonder just how wildly impractical it would have been to build such outboard
hardware acceleration into a cartridge in 1998.

~~~
vanderZwan
Someone managed to make this for the TI-83+, which only had a Z80 chip and
nothing else:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wjM8ude3Rs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wjM8ude3Rs)

~~~
simcop2387
The big difference there is that the gameboy didn't have a way for you to draw
on the screen directly. It was a sprite/tile-mapped only system. Same with the
NES and SNES, which is why a co-processor such as the SuperFX was needed, to
generate the tiles needed for arbitrary graphics. the Megaman X series also
used a coprocessor (in 2+ i think?) that allowed them to use compressed data
and arbitrary rotation of a sprite by generating the tiles on the fly.

~~~
camhenlin
Interestingly, in MegaMan X2 and X3, the Cx4 coprocessor built into the game
cartridge is used for some very specific wireframe animations used in only
very specific areas of each game and was largely unnecessary. (Only 2 scenes
in X2: a miniboss and the final boss, and one scene in X3: after defeating the
final boss)

~~~
simcop2387
Interesting, I had thought it did some sprite compression also but it looks
like I was confusing it with the SDD-1. There's a lot of neat co-processors
out there that got used. It's one of the things I loved about the cartridge
era systems because it let them get upgraded in ways you can't do anymore.

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doubleorseven
This is huge!!! I just pulled my super mario cartridge yesterday out of
storage to test that it still works. I would love to get a copy when you are
done.

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Rolpa
He should seriously consider replacing the Wolfenstein content with his own
stuff and release it as an independent title! I know I would love to see a new
release for my GBC...

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paulcole
Just curious, but what would you pay?

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JonnieCache
There are people out there making new NES games and selling them on real
carts. They go for about $40; obviously they don't typically include ARM
coprocessors. Sometimes they have blinkenlights though.

[https://www.retrousb.com/index.php?cPath=30](https://www.retrousb.com/index.php?cPath=30)

