This fan-made version was created by a developer for a 40-year-old laptop, and this story proves that a game ported (or implemented) for an older platform can be just as popular as the original.

We’ve already seen the PS1 demake of Bloodborne, for example, so here’s Baldur’s Gate 3 after that. It’s not a 1:1 demake, which is understandable considering the target hardware. We’re talking about a TRS-80 Model 100 computer, perhaps the world’s first laptop, with an 8-bit processor clocked at 2.4 MHz, a few kilobytes of RAM, and a built-in LCD display with a resolution of 240×64. It’s impossible to run Larian’s game on it in its original form.

Alex Bowen has created Mol, a 1980s-style interactive fan artwork that pays homage to the first act of Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s not exactly a game, but most of the main events of the first chapter appear, and while it’s understandable that the hardware is very limited, the simple sprites are pleasing to the eye. Bowen needed 24 kilobytes for the engine, text, and basic sprites, but even that wasn’t enough. He had to use tricks to fit tons of information, definitions and dialog into the TRS-80’s very limited RAM.

Bowen worked on Mol alongside another project. The Dungeon Delver Engine allows us to make RPGs based on Dungeons & Dragons OGL-SRD version 5.1. The code for this is also available on GitHub, so if you have an old machine you can run it on it.

It’s just a question of when we’ll get to the point where we’ll literally be running a game on a toaster. Now we really can’t be far away from id Software’s evergreen FPS DOOM getting that coveted toaster port, because we’ve seen this game run on a lot of interesting hardware.

Source: PCGamer, GitHub, GitHub