'Yes, that's Counter-Strike on a PSP!': Modder gets favorite PC FPS working on Sony's 22-year-old handheld console
Overview & Key Takeaways
That's one way to introduce a new lease on life to original hardware.
Admittedly, I've been feeling pretty dour about the whole handheld gaming PC thing lately, but I do still love having the option to take big games on the go. What I love a lot less is just how chunky modern handhelds have to be in order to contain and cool all of their internal hardware. Perhaps I'm just yelling at clouds but if you ask me, the Switch Lite and the PlayStation Portable had the right idea when it came to a portable form factor.
Well, an enterprising modder has apparently heard my cloud-yelling. Developer Yifeng Wang has created OpenStrike, a Counter-Strike clone that apparently enjoys a tiny 12 MB RAM footprint and runs at 60 FPS on Sony's 22-year-old PSP handheld (via Tom's Hardware).
Though described as only being a proof-of-concept, the developer still went incredibly hard on this project; Wang built his own Rust-based 3D engine called Pocket3D, plus a JavaScript engine called PocketJS. We're still a ways off from seeing the OG's buying stages find their way into OpenStrike, but all eight of Counter-Strike's original maps have been tested, and you can try your hand at elimination matches against bots in the current build.
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If you're interested in noodling with this project yourself, either on your own original hardware or via an emulator, you can check out the GitHub Distro here. However, you'll need to supply your own copy of the Counter-Strike asset data.
OpenStrike makes the most of some fascinating technical limitations. For instance, the original PlayStation Portable features a teeny-weeny 4.3-inch display with a 480 x 272 resolution. OpenStrike runs at this native resolution at 60 fps thanks to some very neat technical know-how.
For one thing, non-visible areas of the map are still culled via Binary Space Partitioning, rather than a more modern, and potentially hardware intensive, algorithmic solution. For another, graphical assets are pre-processed, baking lightmaps into vertex colors rather than relying on any realtime or on-startup calculation shenanigans. So, no, this is not the most dynamic or shiny these maps have ever looked but it gives the decades old hardware room to catch its breath.
OpenStrike also works on 2011's PS Vita handheld console with native graphics. This slightly more sprightly hardware enjoys a display that is a whole 5-inches big, offering a resolution of 960 x 544. Okay, I admit it—I'll happily take the Steam Deck's 7.4-inch OLED display with its 1280 x 800 resolution over that dinky little canvas. If you're less keen on the whole Sony hardware dimension, you could alternatively take a look at Counter-Strike 1.6 right here in your browser.
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