Archive for the ‘Alchemy’ Category
Porting Doom to Flash – Interview with Mike Welsh
Most of you will more than likely have heard about Alchemy by now, an Adobe project that allows C/C++ code to be cross-compiled to ActionScript. I was incredibly impressed to see an actual port of Doom running in the browser released into the wild just days after Alchemy hit labs.adobe.com.
I recently had the opportunity to do a quick interview with to the developer behind the Doom port. Its a fascinating read that I wanted to share with you.
Q. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and how you got the idea to port Doom using Alchemy?
My name is Mike Welsh. I’ve been working for the past few years as a Flash developer for Newgrounds, where I spend a lot of time staying on top of new technology and developments in the Flash community. I also did some work for Castle Crashers. Doom is one of my favorite games, and id Software is nice enough to release the source. It was a good way for me to get familiar with Alchemy.
Q. When did you hear about Alchemy and how did you get started with it?
I first heard about it from watching the sneak peak videos from Adobe MAX right on your site! Scott Petersen showed a very cool demo of Quake running inside the Flash Player. This was very impressive, but I remained skeptical. Was it actually cross-compiling C to ActionScript bytecode? Or was it just a trick to run native binary code? As more information was released, it became clear that it was compiling into AVM bytecode, and I was really intrigued. When Alchemy was initially released a few weeks ago, I downloaded it and plunked through the documentation. I figured that I’d use the Doom source to test it out.
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