Today, classic FPS games are on the menu in the homebrew scene with both the PSVita and Switch getting a slice of the cake. In this article, we’ll be looking at the release of vitaExhumed for the former and a significant update to the Chocolate DOOM port and launcher of the latter.

PSVita Release: Rinnegatamante ports PCExhumed to the console allowing you to play PowerSlave/Exhumed

As most of us know, the PlayStation Vita is a tad lucklustre in the commercial FPS games department but the homebrew community managed to rectify that with Rinnegatamante being on the forefront of such efforts. Thanks to this, the PSVita got ports of Quake I-III, Redneck Rampage, EDuke32 and other titles which have seen tens of thousands of downloads on VitaDB alone.

If you’re a fan of ancient Egypt then you should certainly give PowerSlave a try on your PSVita!

Now, Rinnegatamante has made another addition to the FPS homebrew game library for Sony’s current portable and this time, it’s vitaExhumed. As its name suggests, vitaExhumed is a port of PCExhumed by Duke4 Forum member ‘sirlemonhead’ which itself is a port of Exhumed/PowerSlave’s engine that’s based upon code from EDuke32. For those who never heard of the game, PowerSlave/Exhumed (Exhumed is the name used in Europe) is a first-person shooter based on the Build engine (i.e. Duke Nukem 3D’s engine) which is set in the ancient Egyptian city of Karnak. This city was seized by mysterious forces and your task is to find out what’s going on and potentially save the city; quite obviously, you’ll be roaming in ancient Egyptian temples and the enemies featured are from Egyptian mythology.

You may read more about vitaExhumed on its Wololo /talk page & download it via VitaDB; Rinnegatamante may be donated to via Patreon. It’s important to note that you need the data files for the full game to play it as the demo files aren’t compatible yet.

Switch Releases: Chocolate DOOM NX & Launcher 1.1.0 released with hardware acceleration, better mod support and more

Chocolate DOOM Launcher comes with a pretty nice interface which goes well with the rest of the Switch’s UI!

Moving onto another classic FPS title, the Nintendo Switch has just seen the release of two significant updates to its homebrew DOOM offerings by Nichole Mattera. Starting off with the update to Chocolate DOOM NX, the actual DOOM engine port based on MVG’s 2018 port, we have:

• The implementation of hardware-accelerated rendering for improved performance
• Naming save games can now be done with the Switch’s native OSK
• The menus and game can now be controlled by the d-pad if that’s your jam
• Mouse support was removed as it wasn’t working properly and an argument to go back to the launcher on exit has been added
• Two bugs were fixed, one having to do with the right analogue stick and menu sliders and another where setting windowed mode in the configuration file would cause the application to crash

The accompanying launcher, which was initially released a few days ago, also received some significant improvements which include:

• Improved mod support and categorisation
  

  Chocolate DOOM NX also supports family friendly DOOM engine action with Chex Quest and many other IWADs!

  • DEH files are to go in the ‘/dehs’ folder
  • WAD files are to go in the ‘/wads’ folder
  • INI files for configuration are to go inside the ‘mods’ folder
• The main screen now lists both base games (IWADS; i.e. DOOM, DOOM II, Chex Quest and others) and mods
• Each main menu (game) entry now has its own save game directory
• It’s now possible to update both the launcher and the game engine from within the launcher provided you’re connected to the internet
• Hacx (a DOOM II total conversion) is now detectable and Chocolate DOOM NX is no longer allowed to use the SD Card’s root as its working directory

You may grab Chocolate DOOM NX from this link and the launcher from here.

Conclusion

For more stuff to read, Parallel N64 has just received the Parallel RSP dynarec which brings along fast Low-Level Emulation of the Nintendo 64 resulting in playable performance in almost every title even on older CPUs like 3rd generation desktop Core i5 chips (LLE is much more demanding than HLE).