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Comment by david422 | Hacker News Reader

This same guy - Randy Linden - got DOOM to run on SNES. I don't know where I read the original article - but the amount of skill it took for him to accomplish this was just incredible:

"DOOM on SNES happened thanks to the genius and determination of a single man: Randy Linden. The man had an admiration for the game and decided to port it to a mass-market machine so more players could enjoy it. Randy never had access to the source code or the assets from either the PC or the console version. He started from nothing."

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"After developing a full prototype, he later showcased it to his employer, Sculptured Software, which helped him finish the development. In the interview, Linden expressed a wish that he could have added the missing levels; however, the game, already the largest possible size for a Super FX 2 game at 16 megabits, only has roughly 16 bytes of free space. Linden also added support for the Super Scope light gun device, the Super NES mouse, and the XBAND modem for multiplayer."

Absolute madlad

I was lucky enough to work with Randy at Microsoft, an incredible developer all around.

Strangely enough for the majority of the time we were working with him, none of us knew he was a programming legend. I think eventually someone was Googling team member names and realized who we had in our midst!

What was he working on at ms? I watched a video about his snes port of doom, amazing stuff (and slightly depressing know I'll never be any where near that level).

Microsoft Band! He did a variety of stuff on the team, including some parts of the underlying runtime and also our build system. He added 3rd party compiler support to Visual Studio long before they officially supported it. :)

> (and slightly depressing know I'll never be any where near that level).

Randy is very persistent. That Quake demo was 2 years in the making, and that was after he'd already spent over a decade writing low level code.

Highly optimized code is a matter of time, time, and more time. It is a thousand little improvements that get you towards your goal.

If you want to learn to write that type of low level code, and it is very rewarding, Pick up an embedded board like an ESP32 and go have at it.

What kind of projects those boards might be use of? I actually owned a Tiva launchpad and went through a whole book writing embedded code (not really very practical though, just textbook exercises) but don't see any constraints there. I was about to write some code to drive a LCD screen for my "proto-type gameboy", but it didn't go well because I failed to write the driver. Maybe I should pick it up again.

Fascinating and motivating reply. Thanks :)

He also wrote the commercial PlayStation emulator "bleem!". That is, he single-handedly wrote an emulator of a then-current console that ran well enough that people actually paid for it.

I'm still looking for my bleem! cd. Man those were really the golden days and no one knew it or told me.

Metal Gear Solid on Dreamcast blew my mind. I had no idea anything like that was possible.

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