What's the worst port of Doom?

[Redneckerz]

13 hours ago, BunnyWithBeans said:

Eternity is the worst port.

 

Okay, it's actually pretty good, but it runs like crap for whatever reason on my machine and I'm too lazy right now to learn how to fix it.

Open up a thread and ask for help and mention what your setup is, your specs, which build of Eternity, in the Eternity forum. The folks there, especially Printz and Altazimuth are highly active in there and can help you fix your issue.

 

Calling a port the worst as a joke because you are too lazy to fix it is counterproductive.

13 hours ago, BunnyWithBeans said:

 

More on console Doom; I seriously cannot imagine playing Doom on the GBA. It sounds like hell.

Both versions of Doom work pretty snazzy, one does not use the Doom engine at all. GBA is also powerful enough to host a port of PrBoom and there is a standalone Chex Quest build to play Chex Quest on your GBA.

[BunnyWithBeans]

4 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

Both versions of Doom work pretty snazzy, one does not use the Doom engine at all. GBA is also powerful enough to host a port of PrBoom and there is a standalone Chex Quest build to play Chex Quest on your GBA.

 

I mean playing it on real hardware. Say you have the original GBA, you'd be playing Doom with a D-Pad, weird strafe control (I assume the GBA bumpers are for strafing) and no backlight. You'd probably get a slightly better experience on the SP because it has a backlight, but I'd seriously rather just play on PC or Switch or most other platforms.

Having it be able to host a port of PRBoom is cool (and looks seriously impressive for the hardware) though.

[Redneckerz]

33 minutes ago, BunnyWithBeans said:

 

I mean playing it on real hardware. Say you have the original GBA, you'd be playing Doom with a D-Pad, weird strafe control (I assume the GBA bumpers are for strafing) and no backlight. You'd probably get a slightly better experience on the SP because it has a backlight, but I'd seriously rather just play on PC or Switch or most other platforms.

Back in the early 00's, Handhelds were far less powerful (in 2001, all you had was the Gamepark GP32 that was actually more powerful). GBA even being able to run the Doom engine was impressive. And it even looks more faithful to Doom than the SNES version did.

 

I have played other FPS's on GBA and its definitely servicable.

33 minutes ago, BunnyWithBeans said:

Having it be able to host a port of PRBoom is cool (and looks seriously impressive for the hardware) though.

Its black magik. Most PrBoom features had to be reverted but you could effectively port WADs over in due time. And heck, you can get Chex Quest running. For a platform whose 3D games are mostly on Doom level visuals anyway, that's something.

[United VirusX]

3DO is by far the worst with Saturn second the frame rate is absolute trash as for the 32X it has flaws but its not a bad version the music is terrible though and I like the GBA one it isn't a bad port 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

On 2/7/2021 at 11:54 PM, Vehement_Anger said:

FUCKING TIGER

That one was likely just an existing Tiger Electronic game but with possible custom DOOM artwork behind it.

[Dark Pulse]

50 minutes ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

That one was likely just an existing Tiger Electronic game but with possible custom DOOM artwork behind it.

It's a clear photoshop, as I pointed out earlier (in a joking way) that whoever did it was impressive for changing the bezel artwork, but far less impressive for having it be blatantly the Ninja Gaiden III Tiger Handheld on the screen.

 

Edited May 11, 2021 by Dark Pulse

[omx32x]

42 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

It's a clear photoshop, as I pointed out earlier (in a joking way) that whoever did it was impressive for changing the bezel artwork, but far less impressive for having it be blatantly the Ninja Gaiden III Tiger Handheld on the screen.

 

cant see the image

[Dark Pulse]

51 minutes ago, omalefico32x said:

cant see the image

Of course, site must have hotlinking protection because it worked just fine when I did it...

 

Well, here's a mirror instead.

 

[Redneckerz]

7 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Of course, site must have hotlinking protection because it worked just fine when I did it...

 

Well, here's a mirror instead.

 

Also no buenos here on that one.

 

But if it was a picture of an actual mirror then this reflects badly on you.

[Maes]

9 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Of course, site must have hotlinking protection because it worked just fine when I did it...

 

Well, here's a mirror instead.

 

Well, no wonder that one was chosen as a base for the photoshop. From a distance, the screen background looks techbase-like, the ninja kinda looks like Doomguy, and that blob on the right could be a Pinky....and hey, it actually says "The ancient ship of DOOM" under the title ;-)

Edited May 12, 2021 by Maes

[Gez]

The whole rip and tear meme would have been very anachronistic for a real Tiger gizmo.

[Dark Pulse]

4 hours ago, Gez said:

The whole rip and tear meme would have been very anachronistic for a real Tiger gizmo.

Actually, tough call on that. The comic claims May '96, but as we well know, comics are usually published a month or two prior to that date. So let's say March.

 

In March of 1996, Tiger Handhelds were definitely on the way out, but they were still making them at that time. Here's a listing for a sealed, still-new, Space Jam handheld - one that came out in 1996, if not 1997. The movie came out in November of 1996, well after the publication of the Doom Comic.

 

So, theoretically, it would've been possible.

 

Fun fact: The original Space Jam website is still online! They've moved it to a new URL owing to the new one coming out, but it's exactly as it otherwise was back in 1996.

Edited May 12, 2021 by Dark Pulse

[Maes]

Hmm...thinking of Tiger handhelds, 2D scrolling games were yeah, kinda atrocious, but other genres could be halfway decent.

 

Maybe I'm biased, since my first Tiger electronic handheld was Gauntlet, but I think it'd make for a better base for a "FPS" of sorts.

 

 

It's not hard to imagine a status bar on the bottom, losing the player sprite,  use the same wall mechanism (there also were doors and keys), same pickup mechanism etc. and you would have something that at least looks like a dungeon crawling game. Which is what many "ports" of Doom actually were, BTW, so no biggie here since we're talking discrete electronics, 0-bit hardware. Hell, the monsters (Grunts) already look somewhat like Pinkies ;-)

Edited May 12, 2021 by Maes

[Gez]

The problem isn't the age of the comic, but the age of the meme. The comic itself would have been far too obscure in 1996 to have been an influence. In December 1998, with Doomworld's Five Years celebration releasing a scan of the comic, the earliest form of the meme appeared. Cyb used some Doom comic phrases in the Zort series (starting with Zort 6, from December 1999).

 

It's not before 2016 that the insanity of the Doom comic would turn into mainstream marketing material for the Doom "brand".

 

From a gameplay perspective, with just two buttons and a 2D platformer game, it also wouldn't make sense to have two different functions that are basically the same thing. The actual game has "jump" and "attack/pick" which makes perfect sense. For a Doom platformer, there would definitely be an "attack" button but the other button? I'd have it as "switch weapon", so you could cycle between, say, shotgun, chaingun, and rocket launcher. I'd map "jump" to pad-up, and "use" to pad-down. Kinda bare-bones but it'd work I think.

[Allhailnewflesh]

Can anyone plz tell me in a few words(or not) how on earth did 32X Doom manage to run so much better than the abysmal 3DO one, considering the massive power difference in console power in 3DO favour(just look at some of the other games). My guess was always that 32x used a graphics low res mode which allowed it to run Doom pretty fast while 3do used high settings, am i wrong? and yes I'm aware of all the controversy with rushed 3do version but that doesn't explain it in the slightest to me considering 32x one was extremely rushed to the market too, in fact it was the first console port ever released.

Edited May 12, 2021 by Allhailnewflesh

[Edward850]

58 minutes ago, Allhailnewflesh said:

Can anyone plz tell me in a few words(or not) how on earth did 32X Doom manage to run so much better than the abysmal 3DO one

The 3DO port, due to colossal mismanagement and hubris by CEO Randy Scott, had to be handed off and made in ~10 weeks Rebecca Heineman who had no immediate knowledge of the engine. The 32X port meanwhile was developed by John Carmack.

Edited May 12, 2021 by Edward850

[ZeroTheEro]

1 hour ago, Allhailnewflesh said:

Can anyone plz tell me in a few words(or not) how on earth did 32X Doom manage to run so much better than the abysmal 3DO one, considering the massive power difference in console power in 3DO favour(just look at some of the other games). My guess was always that 32x used a graphics low res mode which allowed it to run Doom pretty fast while 3do used high settings, am i wrong? and yes I'm aware of all the controversy with rushed 3do version but that doesn't explain it in the slightest to me considering 32x one was extremely rushed to the market too, in fact it was the first console port ever released.

Like what Ed said. 32X might be rushed as well, but Carmack made his magic. I remember someone recollecting that Carmack camped in the Sega of America HQ to get the porting done.

Also Randy thinks gamedev is so easy that you can add new weapons and monsters easily, and he gave a retail copy to Rebecca, who had to call up Carmack for a source code.

[Dark Pulse]

9 hours ago, Maes said:

Hmm...thinking of Tiger handhelds, 2D scrolling games were yeah, kinda atrocious, but other genres could be halfway decent.

 

Maybe I'm biased, since my first Tiger electronic handheld was Gauntlet, but I think it'd make for a better base for a "FPS" of sorts.

 

 

It's not hard to imagine a status bar on the bottom, losing the player sprite,  use the same wall mechanism (there also were doors and keys), same pickup mechanism etc. and you would have something that at least looks like a dungeon crawling game. Which is what many "ports" of Doom actually were, BTW, so no biggie here since we're talking discrete electronics, 0-bit hardware. Hell, the monsters (Grunts) already look somewhat like Pinkies ;-)

As an aside, it makes me happy to know the MAME team has figured out a way to preserve these. I should go back and play a few of them sometime... I remember at least three of them: Electronic Bowling, Karate King, G.I. Joe Star Brigade (which actually has a character on the art that could pass for a Doomguy if you squint).

 

9 hours ago, Gez said:

The problem isn't the age of the comic, but the age of the meme. The comic itself would have been far too obscure in 1996 to have been an influence. In December 1998, with Doomworld's Five Years celebration releasing a scan of the comic, the earliest form of the meme appeared. Cyb used some Doom comic phrases in the Zort series (starting with Zort 6, from December 1999).

 

It's not before 2016 that the insanity of the Doom comic would turn into mainstream marketing material for the Doom "brand".

 

From a gameplay perspective, with just two buttons and a 2D platformer game, it also wouldn't make sense to have two different functions that are basically the same thing. The actual game has "jump" and "attack/pick" which makes perfect sense. For a Doom platformer, there would definitely be an "attack" button but the other button? I'd have it as "switch weapon", so you could cycle between, say, shotgun, chaingun, and rocket launcher. I'd map "jump" to pad-up, and "use" to pad-down. Kinda bare-bones but it'd work I think.

Jumping in Doom? Heresy! At least until the source port era.

 

By 1998, Tiger handhelds had pretty much dumped the classic 80s form factor, but even then, they were still pushing them out. Since you mentioned 1998, here's a handheld of a game called "Invaders" from that time.

 

 

I read somewhere that the last game they ever released based on this tech was some sort of Rocket Power game all the way in the year 2000. I can't confirm that though.

Edited May 13, 2021 by Dark Pulse

[Gez]

6 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Jumping in Doom? Heresy! At least until the source port era.

I suppose a 2D sidescroller without jumping would be a 1.5D game as alluded to by Sandy Petersen...

[chungy]

19 minutes ago, Gez said:

I suppose a 2D sidescroller without jumping would be a 1.5D game as alluded to by Sandy Petersen...

VVVVVV is 1.5D? :)

[Gez]

VVVVVV doesn't have jumping per se, but it has at-will gravity flip, so that's kind of like jumping in effect: you can still travel left and right (one full dimension) as well as up and down (another full dimension). While, say, a shoot 'em up with constant scrolling is 1.5D because there's a dimension where you can only travel one way. So if there's a platformer where you can only travel left, right, and down but not up, it'd be 1.5D.

 

And if you can only travel right and down, then it's 0.5+0.5D! :D

[Maes]

Well, Flappy bird for instance would be a 2D game (since the character navigates a 2D world) with only one degree of freedom (you can only control your flight height, with a deliberately crippled control, which would make it almost 0D).

 

Parking a car is 2D problem (unless you start climbing sidewalks...) but you only have a limited control on the two dimensional movement of your vehicle, since you have to pivot the front wheels to steer and only go forward/backwards, altering your course to a curve, but you cannot go directly sideways. There's a mathematical name for this sort of constrained movement problem, but I don't recall it.

 

FWIW I once had a very simple Nikko R/C car that only had one control: you could only move forward (one speed, of course), while steering was accomplished by letting go of the throttle. Then the car would go automatically in reverse AND turn to the left at the same time (the front wheels were on a pivoting axle, that only moved when going backwards). If you wonder how could anything be so crap, hey, that's 1980s poor kid's toys for you :-p That sure taught me a lot about reverse maneuvering O_o

 

SO you could say I had a 1D-controls car moving around in a -mostly- 2D world...

Edited May 13, 2021 by Maes

[Allhailnewflesh]

On 5/13/2021 at 2:38 AM, Edward850 said:

The 3DO port, due to colossal mismanagement and hubris by CEO Randy Scott, had to be handed off and made in ~10 weeks Rebecca Heineman who had no immediate knowledge of the engine. The 32X port meanwhile was developed by John Carmack.

Yeah I know about 10 weeks and Rebecca but I forgot about Carmack making the 32x port, my bad.. It always stuck in my head that ID made Atari Jaguar port, which they also apparently made. If only Carmack was asked to make 3DO one too, it could've been great..

[Edward850]

7 minutes ago, Allhailnewflesh said:

Yeah I know about 10 weeks and Rebecca but I forgot about Carmack making the 32x port, my bad.. It always stuck in my head that ID made Atari Jaguar port, which they also apparently made. If only Carmack was asked to make 3DO one too, it could've been great..

Well even then, 10 weeks is not enough time to port AND optimise the code, even from the existing jag code. 32X had more time than that.

 

Doom is a rather curious beast, consoles for the longest time simply didn't have the CPU horse power to handle its rendering the same way it could on the PC, so they all required very hardware specific features of each individual console to improve the rendering performance.

Consoles were very good at 2D tile rendering but when Doom came out you had a 25mhz 32bit CPU and relatively loads of RAM and cache (compared to consoles) and it could just blast a whole 8bit texture mapper with some basic transformation math. Console simply didn't have the performance to handle this very raw solution as they were instead relying on cheaper configurations with purpose built instruction sets to do all the rendering work, such instructions may not have been suitable for the task at all.

[Maes]

3D FPSs and Doom in particular pretty much killed off 2D consoles and classic home computers. The good old formula "weaksauce CPU and powerful sprite/blitter/scrolling hardware", which worked wonderfully during the entire 1980s and much of the early 1990s, simply didn't cut it anymore. Computers like the Amiga that still soldiered on with this architecture were hit the hardest, and, perhaps for the first time in their career, they were surpassed as gaming machines by the IBM PC compatibles' brute CPU power.

 

To put things into perspective, a 486 PC didn't always guarantee smooth scrolling 2D titles unless the devs knew what they were doing. A title that ran on a 68k Amiga 500/600 with 1MB RAM would need at least a 386 or even a 486 and 2-4 MB, to have a comparable framerate. Comparisons with the Sega Genesis or SNES were even more depressing. But with texture-mapped 3D games, this turned completely around overnight.

 

The Amiga was pretty much killed off by this, as its pitiful array of Doom-clones proves. Old 16-bit consoles -wisely- mostly stayed out of this game, with some very special exceptions like Doom/Wolf3D for the SNES or that Duke 3D title for the Genesis. Even early 32-bit/3D consoles barely kept up.

[Boaby Kenobi]

6 hours ago, Maes said:

Old 16-bit consoles -wisely- mostly stayed out of this game, with some very special exceptions like Doom/Wolf3D for the SNES or that Duke 3D title for the Genesis.

 

Mega Drive/Genesis also had Zero Tolerance, which was my first ever experience with an FPS game back in 94-95, and even though the framerate is pretty choppy I still am fond of that game. Bloodshot was another but I didn't play that. It doesn't appear to run as "smoothly" as ZT.

 

Zero Tolerance

Bloodshot

[Vehement_Anger]

On 5/11/2021 at 11:20 PM, Wadmodder Shalton said:

That one was likely just an existing Tiger Electronic game but with possible custom DOOM artwork behind it.

I know, I know. It was a joke and me pissing on Tiger.

[Dark Pulse]

6 hours ago, Boaby Kenobi said:

 

Mega Drive/Genesis also had Zero Tolerance, which was my first ever experience with an FPS game back in 94-95, and even though the framerate is pretty choppy I still am fond of that game. Bloodshot was another but I didn't play that. It doesn't appear to run as "smoothly" as ZT.

 

Zero Tolerance

Bloodshot

In Bloodshot's defense, the viewport is way bigger, and the engine a bit more advanced. (Wall angles can be any arbitrary angle; Zero Tolerance only seems to support 90 and 45-degree walls.)

[cybdmn]

On 5/12/2021 at 5:07 PM, Gez said:

It's not before 2016 that the insanity of the Doom comic would turn into mainstream marketing material for the Doom "brand".

 

At least the meme got some boost in popularity, when Doom II was released on XBLA, and all the achievements where references to the comic.

[TasAcri]

Isn't SNES DOOM slower than the 3DO one frame rate wise?