Modder Ports PS1 Classic Tomb Raider To Game Boy Advance Handheld, See It In Action
Lara Croft has been on her fair share of adventures over the past two and a half decades. It all started with the original Tomb Raider game released in 1996 for the Sega Saturn, followed by several other platforms, including Sony's very first PlayStation console. It never did see a release for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance...until now. Yay for retro handheld gaming goodness.
This is not an official release, mind you. Rather, it's a port by modder XProger, who gave Lara Croft a path to the Game Boy Advance by way of the open source (and appropriately named) "OpenLara" project. It works, albeit there are just three levels as the moment, and the graphics aren't always butter smooth. But the dang thing runs! Check it out...
There's around six minutes of gameplay in the video above. On Twitter, XProger explains, "The engine has been completely rewritten to support old platforms without FPU and even integer divisions on the CPU. It uses software rasterization and matrix math done in Arm assembly." XProger also says they plan on making ports for the Nintendo DS and DSi handhelds.
Here's the control scheme on the Game Boy Advance...
- D-Pad: move
- A button: action
- B button: jump
- R button: walk and side steps
- L + R buttons: look
- L + A buttons: weapons
- L + B buttons: roll
- Select: Inventory
- Start: Free camera mode
This is an impressive port for sure. And while there are just three levels, XProger hopes to cram the full game on a 32MB cartridge. That will undoubtedly prove challenging, given that there are over a dozen levels in the game.
For anyone interested, you can find the project on GitHub, as well as ports for various other systems and platforms (Android, Nintendo Switch, 3DO, and so forth).
