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Comment by photoGrant | Hacker News Reader

I'm so thoroughly impressed with the speed!

Serious question - why? Quake 1 is 25 years old game. It ran good on first Pentium. Apple Watch CPU is much more powerful.

I’m not saying it’s not cool. But it should be fast.

I suppose because I've seen my Apple Watch struggle with the most basic of things. Like displaying a text message, or scrolling through a full set of apps. It's never felt like a speedy device, and seeing something render so smoothly like this gave a contrast to how I usually feel. That help?

The first gen watch was very much like the first gen iPhone - a cool tech demo on underpowered hardware.

It was supported far too long, and with its final updates it was barely suitable as a timepiece. It couldn’t handle the most basic of tasks, like receiving messages or playing MP3s on your AirPods.

That is quite surprising given that a Pentium 166MHz had zero issues playing mp3s in winamp, 1998 hardware.

Hell you could play mp3s on a 486 if you put winamp's decoder in half quality

Maybe, except Pentiums were the current generation when winamp came into the scene, hence why I made a mention to it.

1998 hardware meets 2022 code

At least watchOS doesn't run Electron.

Yet

More like 1995 hardware.

Could be, the date I mentioned is when I could afford buying a P166, and I didn't bother to check the interwebs for the release date, now I have gone and found it, depending on the exact variation from P5 or P6, it could have been released between 1995 and 1997.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium#Pentium

Did it have a five gram battery?

How do you think it would keep BIOS settings stored in RAM between power cycles?

A game similar to Quake coded in a modern high level language would probably be too slow on that watch.

Indeed. Currently playing Prodeus which is made by a couple of people using unity. Runs with about ~100 FPS whereas Doom Eternal hits about twice as that while looking much, much better.

In fact, there's a recent game called HOAT or something. Built by a single guy using the Quake engine. Had to return it because it was running with 30fps on my machine.

It's not using the Quake engine, or it wouldn't be running at 30 fps on current hardware. It's probably Unity or something more modern and bloated.

If the parent comment meant HROT, it’s using a custom engine written in Pascal.

Yeah, that's the one. Custom engine in Pascal. Now, where did I get this Quake engine idea from.

Thanks anyway

Because the source code was published years ago, giving more life to the game.

This is the power of Open Source.

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