At this point in time it can be safely stated that the question ‘Does it run Doom?’ defaults to a resounding ‘Yes’. This raises the question of what next games should be seen as some kind impressive benchmark, with [Game of Tobi] gunning heavily for Nintendo 64 titles. Most recently he ported Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to the Apple Watch, with the port almost ready for release along with Super Mario 64 after a few more issues are fixed.
Although there are a few approaches when it comes to porting Nintendo 64 games to other systems, if the target system is effectively a small PC with all of the amenities such as rendering APIs, then using the Ship of Harkinian project as the basis is a good start. This is what [Toby] did with the Apple Watch, and after some work it runs Ocarina of Time at a solid pace, with as the main flaw being busted text rendering.
Of course, the overwhelming flaw with any small gaming system and touchscreen-only systems is that our meaty paws do not shrink that well, and using telepathy to control game systems still isn’t a feature. Thus the biggest compromise with the Apple Watch port is that you have the controls overlaid on the screen. This could probably be compensated for with a Bluetooth controller or similar, but that poses its own problems when it comes to two-handed playing.
Practical issues aside, it’s pretty amazing that just about any ‘smart’ device that we carry around with us can also be a full-featured retro gaming system, and we appreciate [Toby]’s efforts in making this a reality.