As a video game, DOOM has achieved cult status not just for its legendary gameplay and milestone developments but also because it’s the piece of software that’s likely been ported to the most number of platforms. Almost everything with a processor can run the 1993 shooter, but as it ages, this becomes less of a challenge. More modern games are starting to move into this position, and Factorio may be taking a leading position. [Point Substantial] has gotten this game to run on a mobile phone.
The minimum system requirements for Factorio are enough to make this a challenge, especially compared to vintage title like DOOM. For Linux systems a dual-core processor and 8 GB of memory are needed, as well as something with at least 1 GB of VRAM. [Point_Substantial]’s Xiaomi Mi 9T almost meets these official minimum requirements, with the notable exception of RAM. This problem was solved by adding 6 GB of swap space to make up for the difference.
The real key to getting this running is that this phone doesn’t run Android, it runs the Linux-only postmarketOS. Since it’s a full-fledged Linux distribution rather than Android, it can run any software any other Linux computer can, including Steam. And it can also easily handle inputs for periphreals including a Switch Pro controller, which is important because this game doesn’t have touch inputs programmed natively.
The other tool that [Point_Substantial] needed was box86/box64, a translation layer to run x86 code on ARM. But with all the pieces in place it’s quite possible to run plenty of games semi-natively on a system like this. In fact, we’d argue it’s a shame that more phones don’t have support for Linux distributions like postmarketOS based on the latest news about Android.
Thanks to [Keith] for the tip!
There is a better alternative to Factorio. It is Mindustry ( https://mindustrygame.github.io/ ) and it runs in any device (maybe a N64 not) and it is free software.
The red-stone/logic wires in Mindustry is so neat it’s actually triggering my OCD in a good way. Because the Factorio’s old wooden power poles and mess of wires stress me out.
And the colour pallette Mindustry is so beatiful and sunny like as old games.
I’ll fight you.
Factorio is a golden god and I won’t accept this blasphemy against him.
You’d be fighting more than just him!
Then Plastanium walls for isolating power grids, yet still have em right next to each other, mmm. Factorio is better thou imo.
I miss having Mindustry’s logic system however.
I used to setup dashboards in my bases. logic systems pulling data and showing graphs on the power grid, ammo situation, controlling units. Then buttons to shutoff every production line in the base. I miss that.
Stop missing it, and dive back into the game!
One of the reasons there aren’t a lot of more modern games to follow doom is there aren’t a lot of open source games anymore. Maybe something like amnesia the dark decent? The devs graciously open sourced their game engine, though they didn’t make the game art available afaik. Half life might be another option, with various attempts at an open source engine and plenty of 3rd party levels floating around.
You can download Unreal 5 for free, compared to crap like Quake or Source engine it’s one of the best platforms ever created for developing AAA games, even for indie developers. The main reason why people complain about UE5 games is they live in shitholes like Pakistan where people still use Pentium 4 PCs as daily drivers 🤡
With modern GPU you’ll never match its visuals and gameplay.
Unreal 5 is a meager offering, bloated and unoptimized, based on technological advancements the idtech engine and source blow unreal out of the water.
Cool racism bro, got any other hot takes for us?
Not racism necessarily, maybe nationalism?
Doom was ported to everything under the sun without open source so I don’t know why that would be a factor and games have never really been all that open source … ever
Second my 10 year old knew what doom was without me ever talking about it… what’s this thing you speak of oh a 2010 xbox360 thing with 12k reviews on steam … yea everyone knows that world icon
Didn’t realise someone had ripped off Mega-lo-Mania and improved upon it quite so well.
Bet it doesn’t have the voices tho.
How come nobody tries to port “Lemmings”… a contemporary of Doom, and arguably just as popular at the time.
I think Doom represents a significant enough technical challenge with hardware demands. Lemmings is certainly popular enough to contend with this concept, but doesn’t have to do any of the math associated with what was once a high-end -rig game.
Yea lemmings runs quite well on a xt class machine (until you pop a bunch of them at once)
Box64 runs on Android too, actually.
Nothing against Factorio, but one of the reasons Doom is such a powerful tech demo is that it is finely tuned to be the best possible in its time. It represents a technical accomplishment, and that’s why it’s a tech demo. Factorio seems to follow the modern trend of trying to innovate or refine gameplay while making abhorrent technical choices. I think that trend is well-justified, given how powerful computers are these days…but it makes it absolutely uninteresting as a tech demo?
Anyways, i really don’t like Android but you can do things like access USB & bluetooth peripherals, swap, and run both machine and emulated code on it. If you’re gonna require Steam as part of your demo then it’s really not clear what it is that makes it a hack. Seems like following the path of least resistance from start to finish?
What are you talking about the devs have explicitly labored over optimization and have taken sample maps of people’s megabases in order to identify performance bottlenecks.
It may not be a GPU burner but it can be a CPU burner if they didn’t work so hard to keep it running well.