Barely a day goes by without some retro system developer accomplishing a technical feat that beggars belief. OpenStrike is the latest mad project, creating a proof-of-concept reimplementation of the seminal Counter-Strike for the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP), a 22-year-old system that arguably has no business running the game.

The port was made by Yifeng Wang (aka doodlestrike), who apparently created his own Rust-based 3D engine called Pocket3D for the affair, along with the PocketJS JavaScript engine for the game rules and UI. Despite the proof-of-concept status, Wang says that elimination matches with bots are already playable, though the game's famous buying stages aren't yet functional. The full set of eight original Counter-Strike maps have already been tested, and interested modders should easily be able to roll their own.

The engine manages to run the game with bots at a steady 60 FPS at the PSP's native 480x272 resolution, thanks to pre-processing graphical assets to directly bake lightmaps into vertex colors (as opposed to real-time or on-startup calculations). Interestingly, Wang kept the old-school BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) rendering method to cull non-visible areas rather than use a fancier modern algorithm, lending credence to the "don't fix what isn't broken" motto.

The game also runs on the PS Vita, a system with 4x the effective resolution of the original at 960x544, with native graphics, without upscaling of either 3D rendering or 2D assets. You should also be able to run the project as a standard desktop game, and naturally, it's playable on the popular PPSSPP emulator. To get the project going, you'll have to provide your own copy of the Counter-Strike asset data, similar to using Doom's original WADs in one of the many ports.

The project's entire technical architecture is impressive, as Wang went way beyond the scope of "make a 3D engine that load maps." Both the Pocket3D and PocketJS 2D engines are generic, and OpenStrike is merely the first "product" that uses them. The code runs on a server/client/event architecture, and the event handling (ex: shooting) is decoupled from the rendering core, preventing nasty FPS dips. The game is testable offline, and most everything is trivially moddable. You should check out the OpenStrike repo if you're interested.

Tobias Friedly, also known as Game of Tobi on YouTube, is quite the wizard when it comes to making the seemingly impossible happen on early Nintendo hardware. His latest venture is getting a limited version of Minecraft running on the Game Boy Color (GBC)... but in 3D. As an added bonus, he even got the game working on the original Game Boy in limited fashion, thanks to both machines' interoperability.

Friedly demonstrated his work in a short YouTube video, where it's plainly visible that he managed to coax the GBC's 8x8 sprites into something visually resembling Minecraft in a three-dimensional projection. Although there are no enemies, inventory, or game logic, the feat is exceedingly impressive given that the hardware was never meant to have 3D games.

This is a significant departure from existing Minecraft demakes for old Nintendo gear, seemingly all of which tried implementing the original game's mechanics in a flat two-dimensional space. Friedly's project appears to be an offshoot of his existing Minecraft 3D for the Gameboy Advance.

Even with the limited GBC hardware, he even went as far as adding a map generator that can create flat or bumpy maps. Blocks of various types (including portals) can be placed and removed, and he even added the Nether area of the game. Game saving and loading is included, and there's an option to enable block textures. Predictably the results are a bit iffy given the limited resolution of the display and the inherent difficulty in faking texture mapping with 8x8 tiles.

Despite running at different speeds and color levels, the Game Boy Color and original Game Boy are for the most part compatible, and Friendly even showed that his clone does run on the original black-and-green Game Boy. It's hard to distinguish blocks on that screen — but it works. If you're interested in trying it out yourself, download the cart files that Friedly published.