[eig]

Shockingly enough it is actually possible to do decent ray casting and much more on the GBA despite the incredibly minimal compute budget.

Joshua Barretto has been working on a GBA port of Super Mario 64 with entire 3D levels, characters, and movements. In my opinion just incredible work:

https://youtu.be/9mUsgJ-HiDM

[p1necone]

There was actually a fully 3d platformer released for the system during it's production run, Asterix & Obelix XXL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0pknb4ghUA

[Cpoll]

There was also a Tomb Raider port (and probably other examples of the genre).

[chpatrick]

The one that blew my mind as a kid was Need for speed underground:

https://youtu.be/36U2xN-196c?si=T7xSCeKxss_at3S0

[Newtonip]

The one that blew my mind was Payback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wApAbxZY9k

It's GTA1/2 clone with an overhead view of a full 3D world.

[dmonitor]

I distinctly remember Spider-Man 2 on GBA having a 3D overworld. It was my first introduction to the concept of "low framerate" in a videogame haha. Incredible what people were capable of doing with the hardware back then.

[Dwedit]

I'm more impressed with the song "Get Low" ending up in an E-rated game.

[nxobject]

Amazing - a purely software rasterizer on 16MHz, no floating point, 16-bit data bus, at most 512k of RAM? That’s the original 68k! What’s everyone’s excuse for not getting SM64 running on a Macintosh Plus?

[0xcde4c3db]

I guess you're probably joking, but in case there's any actual confusion:

ARM7 is fully pipelined, and GBA connects it to 32K of on-chip zero-wait-state SRAM, so it's possible for optimized code to approach 16 MIPS with 32-bit operations. The original 68K is a multi-cycle processor and Mac Plus runs it at 8 MHz, which tops out at more like 2 MIPS for 16-bit operations, less for 32-bit operations (the ALUs are only 16-bit).

[cubefox]

In my opinion, the most impressive 3D game for the GBA is still the unfinished port of Quake by Randy Linden:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=R43k-p9XdIk

[sunnybeetroot]

That SM64 port is incredible, thank you for sharing it!