Best and worst Doom console port

[Lord of all demons]

Which is the best console port of Doom and which is the worst

[Job]

SNES Doom. 

 

And SNES Doom. 

[seed]

Best: PSX Doom (then); Unity (now).

Worst: 3DO Doom.

[ReaperAA]

3 minutes ago, seed said:

Best: PSX Doom (then); Unity (now).

Worst: 3DO Doom.

 

^This pretty much.

[Devils950003]

To sum up my response from similar threads:

 

3DO is the worst due to its brutal framerate, but its updated Prince tunes make it a curiosity; this being said, none of the "original era" console Dooms (Jag, 32X, PSX and Saturn) hold up all that well in this day and age.  I'll always have a HUUUUUGE soft spot for the PSX version (by far the best of the lot that I just mentioned) because that's the version that I spent the most time with for many years, and I love that version's sound and lighting effects, and even more so love Aubrey Hodges' compositions...and some levels are actually more fun to play through on that version.  But now that I can play a 60fps version of classic Doom on a hand-held Switch, and turn off Prince's music and sub in Hodges' tunes from an outside source...it's just too hard to go back to the PSX version (lower res, missing textures and a frame rate that chugs hard during some of the Thy Flesh Consumed's busier levels), even if I miss its superior sound effects (not to mention that flaming sky that was just too cool).  At least I can enjoy those same sound fx on Doom 64.

 

So I say current best is the Switch version.  Just like the PSOne with a screen attachment is very forgiving towards PSX Doom, ditto Switch's screen for classic Doom.  Back in the mid-90s, best was the PSX.   

 

 

Edited June 5, 2020 by Devils950003

[vanilla_d00m]

PSX - Best

 

SNES - Worst

 

I had the playstation one for a while (real disc untill I sold it on ebay) and it was like the PC version minus the sound/music.  The levels where identical but not fully the same.  I never played the 3DO one but I seen it on youtube where it ran slow but the soundtrack was good.

 

The SNES version which I played back then where I rented at a video store, has great music but the monsters in the  game only face one direction and have a different kind of way on moving around the maps.  And I think some of the levels where missing?? limitations..

 

 

Edited June 6, 2020 by vanilla_d00m

[Redneckerz]

Hey another one of those threads that totally has not been asked before.

 

PSX (best)

3DO (worst)

 

But to nuance, the 3DO version might be the worst, but it was done with practically no time, the publisher thought it would be smart to make as much copies as there were 3DO's at the time and there was practically no time (That's the takeaway here). For something that had practically no time to develop (And still needed a ton of workarounds because nothing was ever properly documented for Rebecca Heineman) i'd say its Okay.

 

SNES version is actually hugely impressive given the limitations. Yes it removes a lot of things, but it also does not use the Doom engine whatsoever.

 

One particularly bad port could be the Saturn version, because it just does not take any advantage of the hardware. The shitty part is that the original developer actually had it running at 60 fps, but had to drop the renderer.

 

Such a complete misuse of the hardware all around.

Edited June 5, 2020 by Redneckerz
Saturn, not 32x, you stupid moron

[Dark Pulse]

Excluding all the "perfect" ports (basically from anything in the 2000s and up)...

 

Worst: 3DO, easily, but Burger Becky did the best she could with the impossible conditions she was given.

Best: PSX Doom. Can't count Doom 64 as it's technically not a port (but it is the most technically advanced version of the engine before the source port days).

 

1 hour ago, Redneckerz said:

One particularly bad port could be the 32X version, because it just does not take any advantage of the hardware. The shitty part is that the original developer actually had it running at 60 fps, but had to drop the renderer.

 

Such a complete misuse of the hardware all around.

You sure you're not confusing that with the Saturn port? The 32X port was done by id themselves (off the Jaguar codebase, at that - can still still see conditionals for the 32X as MARS in the Jag source code).

Edited June 5, 2020 by Dark Pulse

[Cacodemon345]

3DO can't be really called the worst port in existence objectively, that would be 32x Doom as the final product was far more worse in overall quality. If you excuse the 3DO port's framerate, you will find that it is an otherwise solid port.

 

Note that the 3DO port also was made in a few weeks. 32x port is not inexcusable at all IMO.

[Redneckerz]

20 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

Excluding all the "perfect" ports (basically from anything in the 2000s and up)...

 

Worst: 3DO, easily, but Burger Becky did the best she could with the impossible conditions she was given.

Best: PSX Doom. Can't count Doom 64 as it's technically not a port (but it is the most technically advanced version of the engine before the source port days).

 

You sure you're not confusing that with the Saturn port? The 32X port was done by id themselves (off the Jaguar codebase, at that - can still still see conditionals for the 32X as MARS in the Jag source code).

...yes the Saturn port. ><

[Dark Pulse]

33 minutes ago, Cacodemon345 said:

3DO can't be really called the worst port in existence objectively, that would be 32x Doom as the final product was far more worse in overall quality. If you excuse the 3DO port's framerate, you will find that it is an otherwise solid port.

 

Note that the 3DO port also was made in a few weeks. 32x port is not inexcusable at all IMO.

The 32X port was made in all of a handful of weeks itself. The game came out November 21st, 1994; the earliest prototypes we have are from September 6th. And you figure it also took some time to burn ROMs and get cartridges processed - the last known prototype before the final is from October 8th and it's pretty much indistinguishably close from the final. So that's what... four weeks? Even if you presume it was in development before then, maybe six weeks? (Of particular note, it doesn't clearly switch to the cut-down Jaguar Doom build until September 14th.)

 

Also, saying "It's great if you excuse the framerate" is like saying "Doom is just as great as Quake if you excuse the 3D." Doesn't really work that way when you apply it to one of the fundamental aspects of the game, which in this case is "show these images quickly."

 

30 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

...yes the Saturn port. ><

Sympathy headpat.

Edited June 5, 2020 by Dark Pulse

[taufan99]

6 hours ago, Job said:

SNES Doom. 

 

And SNES Doom. 

Seconded this.

[Cacodemon345]

8 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Also, saying "It's great if you excuse the framerate" is like saying "Doom is just as great as Quake if you excuse the 3D." Doesn't really work that way when you apply it to one of the fundamental aspects of the game, which in this case is "show these images quickly."

None of the computers back then were even able to run Doom at 35 frames per second when the PC version was released in 1993.

 

8 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

The 32X port was made in all of a handful of weeks itself. The game came out November 21st, 1994; the earliest prototypes we have are from September 6th. And you figure it also took some time to burn ROMs and get cartridges processed - the last known prototype before the final is from October 8th and it's pretty much indistinguishably close from the final. So that's what... four weeks? Even if you presume it was in development before then, maybe six weeks? (Of particular note, it doesn't clearly switch to the cut-down Jaguar Doom build until September 14th.)

The final product we got was worse than the prototypes though in some aspects; the PC textures were thrown out. The final version's music was worse than the ones we had in the prototypes.

[Dark Pulse]

4 hours ago, Cacodemon345 said:

None of the computers back then were even able to run Doom at 35 frames per second when the PC version was released in 1993.

Well let's see! As it turns out, there are some very old benchmarks of how Doom II ran on literally dozens of PCs.

 

Sticking to 35 FPS as the limit (per your definition), most of those CPUs are 486-based CPUs that came out around 1994-1995 (AM486-80 was a September 1994 release). Just one problem - see that Intel486-100 that gives 36.7 FPS? That's a March 1994 CPU.

 

Doom was, of course, released December 1993. And Doom II in October of 1994. So yes, there actually WERE CPUs that could run Doom II at 35 FPS the day it came out.

 

So barely three months after Doom came out, we already had a CPU that could cap Doom II. And Doom II had higher requirements than Doom (which only recommended a 386/33 IIRC, as opposed to Doom II recommending a 486/66). And it wouldn't come out for another half a year.

 

If you're going to be an absolute stickler and *ONLY* go for hardware that existed when Doom came out, you're possibly right. The table is sadly missing data for the original game, and almost nothing is older than a 486 CPU in there.

 

Suffice to say, though, you'd have to have a very, VERY lousy CPU - probably a 386SX/16 - to have a truly bad experience with Doom on par with the 3DO version. All but the very worst CPUs (the lowest bracket) deliver at least 20 FPS, and even at that middling framerate, that's literally twice as playable as the 3DO version (which averages around 8-12 FPS).

 

4 hours ago, Cacodemon345 said:

The final product we got was worse than the prototypes though in some aspects; the PC textures were thrown out. The final version's music was worse than the ones we had in the prototypes.

32X Doom was built off the Jaguar Doom codebase. So was the Playstation and GBA versions. (Saturn Doom was in turn built off the PSX codebase, and so was Doom 64).

 

You want to know why the PC textures were thrown out? Well, cart space. Pure and simple.

 

In case you didn't notice, the PC WAD file for Ultimate Doom is 11.8 MB. For Doom II, 13.9 MB. Needless to say, videogames did not hold that much space back then. Your average game for SNES or Sega might've been anywhere from 512 KB-2 MB. The largest game on the Sega Genesis/Megadrive (while it was commercially viable - homebrew games have since gone bigger) was 40 Mbit/5 MB (Super Street Fighter II, if you're curious), and that needed to make use of bankswitching as the system could normally only address 32 MBit/4MB of ROM. On the SNES side of things, it was 48 MBit/6 MB (Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean).

 

Simply put, there wasn't enough room to store the entire IWAD data, and ROM was extremely expensive - the bigger your game, the more the game cost, because the ROMs that could hold that game were in shorter supply.

 

So what do you do? Why, you cut it down to whatever size cartridges you buy from Sega, of course!

 

32X Doom was crammed down into a mere 3 MB. (Betas actually were on a 4 MB cart, and the Jaguar version is a 4 MB game as well.) This was a literal necessity. If you don't have a ROM that can hold all the data, some of it must get removed and reduced. Pure and simple.

 

As for the soundtrack? Well, everyone agrees it sucks. The word that's gone around all these years is that it was a quick-and-dirty conversion, but getting the game running on the system to meet its release date (November 21, 1994 - same day the 32X launched) came so close (again, the last beta we have is from October 8th) that basically no time was left to improve it further. This is part of why Carmack had to cut a third of the levels from the 32X version - simply not enough time.

 

Funnily enough, there actually are betas of a version that was worked on AFTER the launch of the game, up through March of 1995. What these later versions did, though, is not really known compared to the original game, and given how hard the 32X crashed and burned (it was discontinued in 1996), there was little financial incentive to develop for it - especially since the Saturn and PS1 were just getting started.

 

EDIT: Forgot to mention the other big reason things would be so limited on consoles - besides ROM space (which I mentioned), these consoles didn't have tons of RAM, and everything - level data, sprite data, textures, etc. has to fit in that RAM. The SNES had 128 KB, 32X had 256KB, Atari Jaguar 2 MB. Even on 3DO (2 MB + 1 MB VRAM), PS1 (2 MB + 1 MB VRAM) and Saturn (2 MB + 1.5 MB VRAM), you wouldn't be able to fit all of the original WAD's contents in (remember, PC Doom needed 3.7 MB, preferably more, and VRAM + regular RAM can't be combined for this purpose). A console wouldn't have 4+ MB of RAM until the N64.

Edited June 6, 2020 by Dark Pulse

[Optimus]

Might be an unpopular opinion but I don't think the 3DO port is the worse.

Few years ago, as I was buying and collecting different consoles, I decided to fully play and finish Doom in every commercial console possible.

 

The one that I still have to finish and abandoned was the SNES version.

I consider the SNES the worse experience I had. It might be technically impressive but there are some odd things when playing.

Of course the framerate is still not there (and I don't know how to compare it with the 3DO, maybe better at some times) but there are some odd things with the gameplay, enemies animation (which I know is cut off to reduce memory) and bullet collision among other things that makes it an annoying experience. Also,. I didn't notice any save or even passwords to continue later, so I'd have to keep my SNES on from what I understand.

 

One thing is, enemies with their reduced animation frame, move like Benny Hill, they shoot in shorts, and your health is also chipped without you understanding (as there is no red flash effect). I was playing casually and then suddenly I was like "Why do I have 12% health? Who shoot me?". Meanwhile I noticed something. When I shoot half a meter left or right from a barrel or enemy, I hit them (barrels explode with one pistol shoot iirc). There is something off with collision (maybe for performance reasons) that might also make those far away hitscanners land shoots more easily on me, combined with the lack of flash, maybe some zombieman shooting from a window,. that's how you get there. Meanwhile, there might be also something with the controls (while the framerate might not be as bad as the 3DO, I have hard time to even not miss the stairs to that green armour. It's tedious)

 

Meanwhile, I could still navigate myself fairly ok on the 3DO version despite the framerate. I know Rebecca Heinmein said she did something with the smoothing of the controllers and that's what I experienced. I had the same positive experience on the 32X version, which might be very low quality graphics and horrible sound but at least smoother framerate, but everytime I try to play it I enjoy the controls and the whole Doom gameplay experience. They might have done something good with the controls too. Strangely enough, that much better Jaguar version gives me hard time with the controls (might also be the weird gamepad). It's personal experience though, I have a friend who thought the 32x controls makes him harder to shoot, while the Jaguar he feels are spot on.

 

Needless to say, my favorite console port is the PS1.

[chemo]

While I wouldn't exactly call the Saturn port the "worst", there's nothing unique or stand-out about it since it's pretty much just the PS1 version with an awful framerate and some graphical downgrades. There's no reason to go back to it. At least the 3DO port's soundtrack is something you could say is an advantage over other versions.

Edited June 8, 2020 by chemo

[Roebloz]

Best port: Doom 2 GBA.

Worst Port: Saturn

[rabidrage]

The Saturn port might have had slightly better resolution and it definitely had the best HUD.  I also like that the weapons are faster.  Not saying it's a competitive port, but I do play all of them for the variety.

[LateNightPerson]

As someone said above, the 32X port is objectively the worst port, and I completely agree. The problems range from missing content (the entirety of Episode 3, the BFG9000, etc), glitches (some walls have missing textures, DOS prompt ending, etc), and feeling like a beta... because that's what this game is. A beta. Notice how I didn't even touch the music, which is basically a dead horse at this point. It also suffers from the same problem as the SNES port where enemies only face forward. Sure the game runs well, but framerate doesn't matter when a game is unfinished. Big Rigs runs well, but is unfinished and is considered to be the worst game of all time (due to other problems, of course). Yes, I just compared Doom on 32X to Big Rigs. The 3DO port at least has all of the levels and weapons, framerate be damned. And the SNES version is objectively better in almost every single way.*

Tldr: fuck the 32X version. It sucks and is worse than the much hated 3DO and SNES versions.

 

Best port? I'm hopping on the PSX Doom bandwagon.

 

*aside from a low framerate and stiff controls.

Edited August 4, 2020 by LateNightPerson