Run Quake II on your Nintendo DS

I love my Nintendo DS, but I was just thinking to myself the other day how it could be so much better. I need some old-school Quake II action. Alright, that's a complete lie, but now that I think of it, it would be cool (provided it could actually run). Apparently a group of hackers have managed to make it happen.

I honestly wouldn't have thought that the hardware could keep up with a game like Quake II. Now the PSP would be a different story. Regardless, this group of Quake die-hards have managed to do the unthinkable.

Of course, the game doesn't run perfectly, you'll run into some quirks while playing, and don't even try to do multiplayer, as it's not working at all. You'll also need a slot-2 card with a minimum of 16 megabytes of RAM. Here's a list of all the good and bad:

About the game:

- every level is playable in single-player mode

- there is no multiplayer

- nearly all graphical effects are done by the DS hardware

- there's auto and manual saving

- there's no mod or TC support (not my fault, I'm afraid)

- there's an on-screen keyboard as well as eight touch buttons (so you can bind functions to them)

The bad stuff:

- again, no multiplayer

- some levels are poorly coded and the performance will hit the floor (in particular security.bsp)

- GUI Z sorting is broken

- no sprite rendering

- some textures are misaligned

- cinematic rendering is disabled

- bits of the world will often pop in/out cos the DS GPU is SO overworked by this game! Some boss models have more polys than the DS can render in a frame...

I don't have a homebrew kit, or I'd likely spend today trying to get this running. If any of you get this running, let us know how it goes! You can download the needed files here. Bear in mind that this is probably not the most legal thing in the world to do. I'm no lawyer, so just go with your gut on this one.

[via DS Fanboy]