Mod Quake 2 with PSX/N64 ports levels to save memory?

[Anthony817]

Well like I linked in the other posts, people have actually ported over the PSX and N64 Quake 2 maps into Quake 2 PC. It would jut be a matter of compiling the game with them added basically along with maybe a few little changes to code right?

https://youtu.be/gWtXz5CJBXg

Converted PlayStation maps 1-6: http://www.mediafire.com/file/vasw2jcas ... eta-b1.zip

https://youtu.be/QPzA4KJRXlo

https://github.com/m-x-d/Mission64-data/releases

But it seems there is an even more optimized version of Quake 2 in development? Anybody heard of this?

https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.p ... 1a40ca23b9

[WedgeStratos]

From looking a little bit into this, that forum just details a long-running effort to port Quake 2 to the Atari Falcon 030 which features, in particular...

• Processor: Motorola 68030 at 16 MHz with MMU and 256 byte instruction and data caches.
• FPU: optional Motorola 68881 or Motorola 68882, PLCC socket
• DSP: Motorola 56001 DSP chip at 32 MHz (16 MIPS).
• Graphics: "VIDEL" fully programmable video controller.
• Memory: 1, 4, or 14 MB of RAM with 512 kB ROM.

And some of the fruits of that labor are all over the place.

This is a showcase of rendering tests done in 2014, all custom work on Quake 2's src.
https://youtu.be/7BBSOJudnvM

And this is the game running on the 030 with id's original rasterizer in 2017.
https://youtu.be/S2RCGctOxsw

Not certain how much we could benefit from these efforts. Alternatively, there was the AmiQuake 2 port which will fluctuate in its own right depending on the machine.
https://youtu.be/61RzFK9xjlQ

[Anthony817]

Great detective work looking more into this. It was daunting as hell reading up about any progress they made because the thread was so long.

Considering the DC is 200mhz we theoretically could see huge gains with this engine if it were to ever come over. Seeing as how that Atari computer's RAM at maximum also has up to only 2mb less than the DC it may be something worth looking into?

I don't know if we will ever get another Quake 2 port. All I know is maybe with some downsampling of the audio and perhaps using the PSX maps we may be able to get good performance out of this with audio enabled. I mean it runs pretty damn smooth on DC as it is without sound.

[DARKHALO2K]

Well like I linked in the other posts, people have actually ported over the PSX and N64 Quake 2 maps into Quake 2 PC.

It's not quite as simple as that.

Only the multiplayer maps of the PlayStation version are available for PC, and I believe that they were remade from scratch by two individuals.

Likewise, there were at least two attempts to recreate the singleplayer levels of the N64 version, but only a few levels were ever released (three from one project, four from another, though that version requires recompiled game code and some additional engine work).

In short, the singleplayer levels of the PS1 and N64 versions have not been ported to the PC. We could work with the remade N64 levels, but there are only three of them.

The N64 levels were completely made from scratch, which means it would take quite an effort to recreate the remaining levels.

And whilst you can open the PlayStation maps in Noesis, it'd require a lot of work to make them usable.

Looking at the Falcon project, it seems that he was writing his own renderer, designed specifically for that hardware, but there's still a lot of work to do and he hasn't shared an update in over eighteen months.

To be clear, these are all good ideas in theory, they're just not so straightforward in practice.