You can run id Software’s game on a potato, in a BIOS, on a fridge, on a toothbrush, but it seems that this is not yet a reality on the technology of the future…

A GitHub user, Lumorti, has created Quandoom, a reimagining of E1M1, the first track on what is now esoteric, experimental hardware. According to him, it can be simulated quite efficiently on a laptop thanks to the QASM simulator. It has 70,000 qubits and 80 million gates. Currently, Atom Computing is the company with the most powerful quantum computer (1225 qubits), which is nowhere near what would be needed for Quandoom (it would need about 57 times the power…).

Quandoom is limited not only by having only the first track, but also by graphics. It has wireframe graphics, and according to Lumorti, there are no sound effects or music in the port, enemies can’t move from room to room, and the imp’s fireball is a hitscan, not a projectile (so as soon as it fires, it hits you).

Lumorti explained that there is still room for improvement: “Right now I’m still cleaning up the engine code, but basically I have about 8,000 lines of C++ functions that allow a number of reversible binary and arithmetic operations on quantum registers, for example “flipIfLessThanOrEqualTo”, which flips all qubits in one register if the value of another register is less than a given value. All this is done with integers. Using such functions I then wrote a small 3D engine as well as all the game logic.

There is also an ancilla system, a garbage system, as well as a quantum subroutine system and many other handy tools… The parallelization is done at the rendering stage, so the list of render objects is split between the cores, and comments are left in the QASM to tell the simulator where to jump to based on the OpenMP thread ID,” the developer wrote.

So it’s an interesting situation: an FPS released over three decades ago can’t run properly on forward-thinking technology. But as technology advances, this will happen…

Source: PCGamer