Quake on Chumby

xobs, a developer at chumby, showed me one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while on a chumby: a full port of Quake. He got the whole thing running under SDL and hacked up the event layer so that the accelerometer (tilting) is used to move in the game, the bend switch is used to fire, and a touch anywhere on the screen is used to jump/activate items. So now you can hug a Linux computer and frag bad guys at the same time. Practical? no. Cool? yes.

Below is a video of the loading screen plus a quick sample of the gameplay.

[flashvideo filename=http://files.chumby.com/hacks/quake_gameplay.flv /]

As you can see the frame rate is very playable on this little 350 MHz ARM9 i.MX21 CPU, although I had a little trouble holding the camera and playing at the same time, while finding a good angle for filming. I never really equated chumby in my mind with a video-game capable system like this, but that’s the joy of open source — people will do things with the hardware that you never expected or had in mind when you designed it. I love it!

You can find out more about how he did it in the chumby developer forum, and if you own a chumby you can download a USB dongle image that lets you play it (and if you don’t own a chumby, you can get one). And, xobs was fastidious about keeping compliant with the GPL and immediately posted the source tarball as well for you to peruse.

20 Responses to “Quake on Chumby”

  1. Very nice… Quake really does run on everything… *amused*
    I shall have to see about getting a Chumby (that name always makes me smile ^.^) when I have the money… They do look like fun to have a tinker with…

    Re: “Practical? no. Cool? yes”
    I thought that was the whole point of hacking? ;)

  2. […] [Update] I hadn’t realized it, but Bunnie has a better quality video of Quake on the Chumby on his page here. […]

  3. advance says:

    interesting article +1

  4. drtune says:

    Nice! Runs very well indeed on my Chumby, took me right back to t’old days.

  5. muriani says:

    It’s like Doom was back in the day.
    Doom was ported to EVERYTHING. Now we just moved to the next one.

  6. […] You can see a video of the thing in action after the break.[Via Bunnie’s Blog] Continue reading Quake ported to Chumby makes for an adorable first-person shooter Filed under: GamingQuake ported to Chumby makes for an adorable first-person shooter originallyappeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments […]

  7. […] Bunnie Studios provided a picture and a video of a Chumby running Quake. Read more on the Chumby forum. […]

  8. […] pimg src=”http://autotechie.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/285eaf5217chumbyquake.jpg” style=”display:block;” /Sure, people port games to totally inappropriate platforms all the time, but rarely do they entail the cognitive dissonance of a full a href=”http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=262″port of Quake/a to the huggable a href=”http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2008/02/hands_on_chumby_wifi_widget_beanbag_cuddly_in_more_ways_than_one-2.html”Wi-Fi beanbag Chumby/a./p !– Gawker Tags/Categories: chumby, games, gaming, quake –img src=”http://feeds.gizmodo.com.au/~r/GizmodoAustralia/~4/480945573″ height=”1″ width=”1″/ […]

  9. […] [Via Bunnie’s Blog] […]

  10. […] chumby redefined at CES January 23, 2009 Okay, it’s hardly surprising given that we make and sell them, but we love the chumby.  And we love our customers, especially because they love their chumbys and the advantage of having their own personalized always-on, at-a-glance internet — and they “get it” that their laptop or smartphone doesn’t already do this.  We love our widget developers, because they make chumby even better all the time and just blow us away with their creativity.  Of course we love chumby hackers (hardware, software and craft), and we wish there were more of them.  Just chumby love everywhere as we approach our first anniversary. […]

  11. […] Quake has been ported to the Chumby. This is just…odd. But I do want to try it. […]

  12. Gus "Rifle" says:

    I have seen quake 3 running on an i-pod touch,but quake 3 running on a chumby is much cooler.

  13. Bodybuil says:

    Очень интересная и поучительная статья. Добавлю в избранное

  14. Gloryhole says:

    Great resources. Thanks

  15. I bookmarked your site to visit you again and recommended it to my friends

  16. […] into the device, the question is what can you do with it? Fortunately, xobs (who also brought quake, 3G, and composite video to the chumby One) left, in my opinion, the best Easter Egg of all inside […]