Bringing Games (and DOOM) to pefiaOS

This update was all about making pefiaOS capable of running real time applications. The desktop was originally designed around event driven apps, so games needed quite a bit of work before they were even possible.

What’s new?

• Off screen rendering to eliminate flickering
• Proper held key input for responsive controls
• Fixed timestep game loop
• Resizable game windows
• Flappy Bird
• Pong
• Tetris
• Mario style platformer
• Wolfenstein style 3D raycaster

Once those were working, I had to answer the obvious question: can it run DOOM? It turns out it can. I integrated PureDOOM by writing a platform layer that hooks the engine into my own memory allocator, timer, input system, framebuffer, and virtual filesystem. Since there’s no disk driver yet, the shareware WAD is embedded directly into the kernel, meaning DOOM now runs inside a normal desktop window on pefiaOS itself. Seeing the real 1993 DOOM running on an operating system I built from scratch has easily been one of the most rewarding moments of the project so far, and it also kinda shows that it can do something cool too, not just boring kernels and such.