Modder gets Half-Life running on an Android smartwatch

Having been a hardcore PC and console gamer all his life, this passion is now applied to Android gaming and writing about it. When not playing or writing about Android games, he spends his time with is wife and son. We’ve seen the FPS pop up on everything from calculators to copiers, but with embedded devices becoming ever-more powerful, the ability to run code almost 25 years old has become old hat. These days, Doom is barely a challenge.

To be clear, the full Half-Life game isn’t really playable on the Android smartwatch (yet), as Bennett’s mod is more about demonstrating how he got the open-source emulator SDLash3D to run on the first generation G Watch.

Smartwatches aren’t the ideal place to play modern video games. Hooray!

Thanks to the SDLash app, you now have the option of doing just that. “Things such as the lava graphics and special lightening caused a huge drop in fps”, Bennett writes in his tutorial. While controlling the game was near impossible on a 1-inch screen, he did manage to rack up an impressive 60fps at some points, although that did plummet to 2fps when things got real in Black Mesa. “Trying to play a game on Android Wear is a nightmare within itself”.

Even worse, however, is that the G Watch’s UI interprets swipes to the left as commands to go back to the previous screen. Modders managed to get Doom, running within Doom. The original Half-Life isn’t multi-threaded in any fashion, so the game is running effectively on a single-core Cortex-A7 CPU and a DX9-class GPU. Check out Ars’ post for all the dirty technical details.