Palm Pre runs Doom, smartphone-loving space marines rejoice

If you were holding off on buying a Pre until it had some great games, start warming up that credit card. We knew homebrewers were already at work and one of those, a bloke who goes by the name Sargun, has managed to get the iconic Doom running on the phone -- or the open-source PRDoom, anyway, which is close enough for us. Sargun re-built the game to use the DirectFB graphics library to pipe all the two-barreled action to the Pre's framebuffer, and said getting the whole thing up and running was "actually fairly trivial." Your mileage may vary depending on your compiler skills, but with any luck someone will host up some binaries to save us all the trouble. Video proof of this great achievement after the break.

[tavisjohn Posted Jun 12th 2009 2:09PM]

@hated

You may be right... If the PRE was running the SAME os as all their other phones over the past 10 years....

However the PRE is a TOTALLY new phone running a TOTALLY new OS.
So if in 10 years Apple releases a new iPhone running a totally different OS and has LOADS of apps out, then and ONLY then will you be right...

The iPhone had no games for 6 months. The Pre is less than a week old with 3 official games. (And the unofficial DOOM makes 4 I know of) And when the SDK comes out there WILL be more games & software.

Everyone wants to compare the Pre being a week old to the iPhone being 2 years old as equals... When the WebOS platform is 2 years old, let's see if there are only 50,000 apps for it. (And I think counting the various fart apps as separate apps is cheating, LOL)

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 12th 2009 2:02PM]

I clicked on this article for 2 reasons:

1: I wanted to see how well the Pre ran doom, which was actually really good.

2: I wanted to laugh at all the iFans whining about "We can do that too! This isn't news!"

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 13th 2009 7:48AM]

Forgive me but surely it makes more sense if you laugh at iFans because the Pre does something that the iPhone does not? The Pre has some great features (notifications done right, for example) but running Doom is hardly something to get excited about, much less laugh at other platforms for something that was done before. Mind you, I can't understand why people would bother posting messages about their own phone doing this - seriously, who cares?

[Dale P Posted Jun 12th 2009 3:56PM]

Can this forced meme please die?

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 13th 2009 9:31AM]

Doom is not really 3D. The game just faking it with "ray-casting" technique.
My friend's smallish old 2005 first-gen iPod Nano can play Doom too at 20-30fps with Rockbox open-source firmware.

Smartphones like Pre at least can run Quake III...

[eule Posted Jun 13th 2009 7:26PM]

even my 80 $ dingoo a 320 plays doom. :P

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 14th 2009 4:34AM]

What's funny is the Pre is so far behind, yet the people who own one think they have a cutting edge phone! ROFL, clueless! And did you see the lines for the pre? Yeah, 10 15 people max, even at the biggest LA and NYC Sprint stores. It's all hype let me tell you..quite a failure.

My google phone (g1) has had Doom on it, running flawless with easy controls..and that's been on it for MONTHS now. Honestly, I played it once or twice..who really cares?

As far as smart phones, Google > Apple > Blackberry(RIM) > Palm...and I've played with them all.

And IMHO, Google phone beats the iphone simply because its had video forever, even before 1.5 cupcake, and it has all the same apps (99% of them) for free instead of having to pay via apple. And it's still cheaper, I got the g1 for $105 OUT THE DOOR TAXED back in early 09, and still has the lowest cost for a 3g smart phone ($55+fees per month here for my minutes, msgs, and unlimited 3g). The new iphone 3gS I have to admit has a badass new gaming platform.. Sims 3 and another game I saw had supurb graphics for a cell phone / smartphone on the new iphone 3gS. Other than that, most of the stuff it just came out with was available on google phone, etc. The new bigfoot (google g1 v2) will stomp all these phones out of the water.

Not to mention ANDROID (google os) is getting fkn HUGE. Dell is using it now for their LAPTOPS. Yes laptops. Acer is jumping on board too...

See google to own the market by the end of December 09....mark my words. And they even have a SECOND new phone the g2. (which only has a virtual touch screen keyboard, unlike the g1)

CANT WAIT FOR BIGFOOT! :D

Do your research before talking crap too, thanks!

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 14th 2009 7:30AM]

I am sorry but if you are expecting Android to dominate the smartphone market by the end of this calendar year then you are clearly nuts. HTC has a total global market share that is 1/2 that of Apple, which in turn is half that of RIM, which in turn is half that of Nokia (actually, I was surprised that Nokia was so far in the lead). Realistically, it will be years rather than months before Android will come to dominate the smartphone market, assuming that ever happens. We can check progress again in December 2010.

[ctmike78 Posted Jun 14th 2009 10:31AM]

Amazing that you managed to remove your lips from Google's nether-regions long enough to spew that insanity.

Guess what? Your amazing Android *and* the Pre are both based on.... LINUX. That means that they have quite a bit in common... more in common than they are different. Really, amounting to hardware and UI differences.

Additionally, I would suspect that Palm learned quite a bit from their whole Foleo disaster... in other words, it would be trivial to get WebOS and it's Linux underpinnings on a variety of platforms, not just the Pre.

Lastly... Google owning the market by end of 2009 is so utterly ridiculous, that I will just leave that alone and let others mock you instead.