A Doom-like engine on the Raspberry Pi – 9800 lines of bare metal assembly
In this technical retrospective (2015), @kcsongor shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 115 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 41 comments
Keep in mind they are calling it a "replica", not a port. From the video there's some form of game logic, the raycaster and asset loader. Other than that, it doesn't appear to be the full game.
Still, though, AWESOME! Can't wait to check out the code when it goes up on Github (they said soon).
Hm, that's hardly anything like doom. It is more like a very basic raycasting engine from several years before that. Doom in 9800 would be really impressive. This does not seem very special if you ever wrote your own engine like that.
I don't even know what to say ... 9800 lines of assembly is so few. I am very impressed. I think I might use more lines writing this in a "modern" language.
Game developers always impress me.
Raspberry Pi seems to be the new target of Atwood's Law in place of Javascript.
Any application that can be ported to Raspberry Pi will eventually be ported to Raspberry Pi.
Great work for a first year project. It was completed in 3 weeks according to the thread. I wouldn't have been able to pull it off.