Lara Croft on a Microcontroller

Once upon a time, you had to carefully budget your microcontroller’s resources if you wanted to do something as simple as flash a bunch of LEDs. These days, they’re powerful …. Lara Croft on a Microcontroller.

These days, they’re powerful enough to humiliate the game consoles of yesteryear. [alexkid77] demonstrates this well, having the ESP32-P4 run Tomb Raider. Now, [alexkid77] hasn’t gone so far as to create a PlayStation emulator on the ESP32 or anything quite like that.

Instead, this is a port—and not of the original Tomb Raider release, either. [alexkid77] started with OpenLara — the classic game running in an open-source engine. With the ESP32-P4 having two cores running at 400 MHz each, there was plenty of processing power on tap to run the engine with a software renderer at 320×240, which is hardware scaled up to 1024×600 via the Pixel Processing Accelerator (PPA) built into the chip.

There’s also stereo audio with an ES8311 codec hooked up, while input is via a USB HID keyboard.