HiGame

For years, the ability to run Doom on various devices has been a hallmark of a system’s flexibility. We’ve seen the FPS pop up on everything from calculators to copiers, but with embedded devices becoming ever-more powerful, the ability to run code nearly 25 years old has become old hat. It’s time for a new standard (though the ability to run Doom within Doom is a fairly nifty recent achievement), Now, modder Dave Bennet has beaten the Doom-level achievement by getting Valve’s original Half-Life up and running on an LG G Watch.

The LG G Watch runs on a Qualcomm MSM8226 with an Adreno 305 GPU. The original Half-Life isn’t multi-threaded in any fashion, so the game is running effectively on a single-core Cortex-A7 CPU and a DX9-class GPU. Then again, that’s a much higher clock speed than when the game shipped, while the feature set on Adreno 305 is higher than what Half-Life supported at release. As you might expect, this is entirely a proof-of-concept — it’s almost impossible to actually play Half-Life on a 1.65-inch screen, even if the game is running in a touch-responsive wrapper.



This hack is made possible by the SDLash application, which emulates the GoldSource engine. GoldSource is the original Half-Life engine and dates back to the original Quake (albeit in a heavily modified form). The usefulness of such a hack is questionable, since few people are going to try to play a game on a smartwatch; the heat and power requirements would likely drain the battery and burn your wrist at the same time. The frame rate also chugs in places, from a high of 46 FPS to as low as 2 FPS depending on what’s going on in-game. There are multiple potential causes for the instability, from emulator issues to throttling of the smartwatch itself, to underpowered hardware.

Then again, the point is that this is frickin’ Half-Life running on a device that fits on your wrist. Give wearables another few tech generations, and the devices that debut on 14nm or 10nm technology in the future could probably run the game, no problem. Then again, this assumes you’d ever actually want to — controlling Gordon Freeman on a 1.65-inch screen doesn’t sound like actual fun.

Still, as a gamer who was thrilled by the original Half-Life on my K6-233 and 8MB Voodoo 2, seeing it running on a device you wear is pretty incredible, even if it makes me feel about 80 years old.


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