Almost 25 years after the first-person shooter video game “Wolfenstein” came out on MS-DOS, a Swedish programmer by the name of Anders Granlund has developed a version of the game on Nintendo’s portable gaming console, the Game Boy Colour, using a custom game board along with a co-processor chip.
Apparently, Granlund was working on his little pet project over the last few months in wanting to get “Wolfenstein 3D” to work on his Game Boy Colour gaming platform.
It is impossible to port a file of the game over so Granlund had to build his own Game Boy cartridge from scratch, details Kotaku.
His pet project actually started with an IO breakout cartridge, manufactured by the community printed circuit board website OSH Park.
Granlund has been logging the entire build of the cartridge at Happydaze.se since he started working on his pet project.
He also wrote on the blog that the Game Boy has a clunky way of handling colors, citing that it has a total of eight palettes of four colors each, and each 8×8 tile can be assigned to one palette.
The latest cartridge supposedly has a grand total of 5kb of room on the ROM. Just 3kb which is enough to fit the remainder of the “Wolfstein 3D” levels, so it would be interesting how Granlund utilized the remaining 2kb.
It has been noted that “Wolfenstein 3D” also runs smoothly on the product with a slightly more powerful hardware than the 8-bit processor on the Nintendo Entertainment System, reports Game & Guide.
The game was also ported to several gaming consoles in the past including the Atari Jaguar. Later on, a heavily censored port came to the 16-bit Super NES that removed the original “Wolfenstein 3D” German Shepherd enemies in lieu of giant mutant rats.
“Wolfenstein 3D” also came to the Game Boy Advance in 2002 and then on the 3DOs.
Original release date
Developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software and FormGen, “Wolfenstein 3D” was first released on May 5, 1992 for MS-DOS.
The game was inspired by the Muse Software video games “Castle,” “Wolfenstein,” and “Beyond Castle Wolfenstein.”
In the game, the player assumes the role of Allied spy William ‘BJ’ Blazkowicz during World War II as he escapes from the Nazi German prison Castle Wolfenstein. He will then carry out a series of crucial missions against the Nazis.
The player, as BJ, needs to traverse through each of the game’s levels to find an elevator to the next level or kill a final boss, fighting Nazi soldiers, dogs, and other enemies with knives, pistols, and other guns.
Modded with ‘Doom’
Incidentally, there are recent reports saying that “Wolfenstein 3D” was modded along with “Doom.”
Apparently, both games have been noted to work on several unlikely devices. It has been noted that “Wolfenstein 3D” may also work on Canon Printers and TI calculators, among others, according to the report.
“Wolfenstein 3D” is reportedly equipped with the ARM Cortex-MO running at 48MHz as well. The chip has been noted with more power than the Intel 386 CPU on MS-DOS.
When it was released in 1992, “Wolfenstein 3D” was a critical and commercial success, garnering numerous awards and selling over 200,000 copies by the end of that year.
It is widely regarded as having helped popularize the first-person shooter genre and establishing the basic run-and-gun archetype for many subsequent games, as well as showcasing the viability of the shareware publishing model at the time.
FormGen developed an additional two episodes for the game, while Apogee released a pack of over 800 fan-created levels.
But developer id Software never returned to the series but did license the game’s engine to numerous other titles before releasing the source code for free in 1995, and multiple other games in the “Wolfenstein” series have been developed by other companies since 2001.
The game is broken up into levels each of which is a flat plane divided into areas and rooms by a grid-based pattern of walls and doors, all of equal height.