Raspberry Pi Quake III Bounty Claimed

quake3

For the Raspberry Pi’s second birthday, the Raspi foundation gave us all a very cool gift. Broadcom released the full documentation for the graphics on one of their cellphone chips and offered up a $10k prize to the first person to port that code over to the graphics processor on the Pi and run Quake III. The prize has been claimed, forming the foundation for anyone wanting a completely documented video core on the Pi.

The person to claim this prize is one [Simon Hall], author of the DMA module that’s in the current Raspbian release. Even though Quake III already runs on the Pi, it does so with a closed source driver. [Simon]’s work opens up the VideoCore in the Pi to everyone, especially useful for anyone banging their heads against the limitations of the Pi platform.

You can get your hands on the new video drivers right now, simply by downloading and compiling all the sources. Be warned, though: recompiling everything takes around 12 hours. We’re expecting a Raspbian update soon.

 

Pan/Tilt Wheel Trainer Ends Up Being A Different Way To Play Quake

This is a special controller that [Gary Scott] built to help train camera operators. The pan and tilt controls on high-end movie cameras use wheels to pan and tilt smoothly. This rig can be built rather inexpensively and used to practice following a subject as you would with a camera. This is where the project takes a turn into familiar territory. [Gary] set up a system so that you can play the game Quake using this controller, with your feet doing the rest.

The pan/tilt controller uses two heads from an old VCR. They are mounted above the guts from an old ball-type mouse. A couple of rubber belts connect the heads to the two mouse bars that are normally rotated by the ball. This gives him control of where the Quake game is looking. But he still needed to be able to move, jump, change weapons. and shoot. So he built a second controller for his feet. It uses a CD and some switches as a joystick, and a set of buttons for the other controls. He actually rigged up solenoids to each of those foot switches to physically press keys on a keyboard. You really must see it for yourself. We’ve embedded his set of videos after the break.

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OpenGL On The Didj

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfXI0crLTBc]

[Losinggeneration] managed to get a homebrew OpenGL application working on the Didj. It’s nice to see the community driven work advance on this device but something else also caught our attention from the forum post. Another poster pointed out that [losinggeneration] has files in one of his directories called “glquake-didj” and “glquake-didj.dbg”. We hope that means a working version of Quake is on the way for the hackable handheld.

[Thanks JJ Dasher]

Quake On The BUG

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tpAHjh7O2Y]

It seems like every piece of hardware has to earn its respect by going through some standard paces. One of which is having Quake ported to it. Much like an angel earning their wings, Bug Labs, with the help of community [CMW], has ported Quake to the BUG. Right now, the only add on needed is the BugView module. Controls are done through the base unit.