Doom for Sega Genesis

[Death Egg]

 

 

 

Haven't seen this mentioned on here before. It only seems to be a rendering test, but it's still impressive. The video is from 2017, but a comment from the creator on the video as recently as 5 months ago says he's still working on it.

Edited January 16, 2021 by Death Egg

[Dark Pulse]

So I guess that will be making this into a reality, eh?

 

Using the power of B L A S T   P R O C E S S I N G

 

 

[taufan99]

I'm not sure which one I'd prefer in term of good lo-fi visuals; this or that Commodore 64 DOOM project by another guy.

The Genesis project definitely needs much more work though, that's for sure.

[Mr.Rocket]

It's pretty amazing to see Doom running on a C64.

I would like to see a better quality version on the Genesis though, would be pretty neat.

Edited July 23, 2020 by Mr.Rocket

[fraggle]

That C64 video is an obvious fake. You're not going to run Doom on a C64.

[Maes]

19 minutes ago, fraggle said:

That C64 video is an obvious fake. You're not going to run Doom on a C64.

 

Yes and no. It's running on a 20 MHz SuperCPU expansion board for the C64.

[Mr.Rocket]

Damn that's a badass C64 then!

~ which no one has..

I gather an emulator would never have such an expansion either, though possible?

 

In other news, TI99/4A running Doom!

J/k..

Edited July 24, 2020 by Mr.Rocket

[CrbnBased]

Porting the idtech engine is going to be near impossible on that hardware, it's impressive so far!

 

There's quite a few first person games on the Mega Drive/Genesis.

Even had a Duke Nukem 3D release in Brazil.

 

 

[Redneckerz]

I mean, perhaps Dread can be ported over once that's done? Likely it won't given how its so specific to Amiga hardware, but atleast it shares the base CPU:
 

 

[Chip]

Soon, there will be a DOOM port for NES.

 

Seriously, this is such a strange idea to me. Does anybody seriously want this for their sega? LoL

[JadingTsunami]

29 minutes ago, LiT_gam3r said:

Soon, there will be a DOOM port for NES.

 

Someone did such a thing (sort of), but it's a bit of a cheat: the cartridge contains a Raspberry Pi.

[Boaby Kenobi]

9 hours ago, CrbnBased said:

There's quite a few first person games on the Mega Drive/Genesis.

Even had a Duke Nukem 3D release in Brazil.

 

That's very impressive for MD. I thought Zero Tolerance was as good as it gets for the Mega Drive.

[Dark Pulse]

17 minutes ago, Boaby Kenobi said:

That's very impressive for MD. I thought Zero Tolerance was as good as it gets for the Mega Drive.

The rumor is that it's a really extensive hack of the Zero Tolerance engine, actually. The rumor remains unconfirmed.

[Death Egg]

I mean regardless of if it's a hacked Zero Tolerance engine, it still already has walls of varying heights working, which is more you can say for every other Sega Genesis first person shooter.

[Eurisko]

Zero Tolerence was a great game. The first FPS I ever played.

[Boaby Kenobi]

@Eurisko Same for me. I remember being completely engrossed by it. I still have the game. That intro music is just incredible.

[Eurisko]

On ‎7‎/‎29‎/‎2020 at 4:01 PM, Boaby Kenobi said:

@Eurisko Same for me. I remember being completely engrossed by it. I still have the game. That intro music is just incredible.

 

Oh agree 100% that intro music was very cool and caught the atmosphere of that game perfect.

[Death Egg]

Seems someone else has done a half working Sega Genesis port, and have released the source this time:

It's written entirely in C rather than using Assembly, and it runs at an unplayable frame rate with a terrible palette, but it's the best attempt I've seen yet.

[Maes]

TBQH that's quite impressive for what it is: pixel-by-pixel rendering on hardware that wasn't designed for it, and with the raw CPU "power" of an unexpanded Amiga 500. No texture/flat simplifications, other than the color (the colormaps look tweaked to map to the Genesis's greyscale colors, though, so I guess 256 -> 16. That's the same trick used on a Texas Instrument port of Doom (NOT the TI/99 one). The internal rendering and data must still be fully 8-bit.

 

All of the above in what appears to be "high detail" mode despite the reduced viewing resolution, with no pixel doubling whatsoever.

 

Esp. the resolution, it looks more as if everything runs through a centered and cropped "viewport" of the original. All in all, I've seen PWADs running just as badly on a "real" 486 PC running Doom.

Edited December 3, 2020 by Maes

[Death Egg]

5 hours ago, Maes said:

TBQH that's quite impressive for what it is: pixel-by-pixel rendering on hardware that wasn't designed for it, and with the raw CPU "power" of an unexpanded Amiga 500. No texture/flat simplifications, other than the color (the colormaps look tweaked to map to the Genesis's greyscale colors, though, so I guess 256 -> 16. That's the same trick used on a Texas Instrument port of Doom (NOT the TI/99 one). The internal rendering and data must still be fully 8-bit.

 

All of the above in what appears to be "high detail" mode despite the reduced viewing resolution, with no pixel doubling whatsoever.

 

Esp. the resolution, it looks more as if everything runs through a centered and cropped "viewport" of the original. All in all, I've seen PWADs running just as badly on a "real" 486 PC running Doom.

Also impressive is that they fit the entire 14MB IWAD in, using a SSF2 mapper to have an expanded 17MB rom. I would have never expected to see Doom running at anything close to this. I wonder what people more experienced in Genesis optimizations can do with this now that the source is out in the open. (And there's still likely unnecessary stuff leftover in the code; a quick run through and I saw some netgame stuff was still in the source, though I don't know how much is still being called)

[Dark Pulse]

Obviously with some optimizations the code could probably be made to run a fair bit faster. Even then though I'd say probably 10-15 FPS would be all that we'd get without some extended hardware.

 

The only thing I could think of that would improve speeds on a stock Genesis, though, would be to somehow wire up the SSF2 mapper along with the SVP (which was only used in the Genesis port of Virtua Racing). That would allow for some kind of hardware-based co-processing.

 

The downside of that being, of course, few people are gonna want to wreck their Virtua Racing carts for Doom, and of course, SVP support is somewhat iffy in a few emulators.

[Noiser]

On 7/28/2020 at 7:38 PM, Dark Pulse said:

The rumor is that it's a really extensive hack of the Zero Tolerance engine, actually. The rumor remains unconfirmed.

This is false. The game code was made by scratch by just two guys (and a third one made the levels). Zero Tolerance also runs on a much smaller screen. Source (in portuguese)

Edited December 4, 2020 by Noiser

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, Noiser said:

This is false. The game code was made by scratch by just two guys (and a third one made the levels). Zero Tolerance also runs on a much smaller screen. Source (in portuguese)

Anyone feel like providing a translation? Not that I doubt the video, but I'd certainly like to know what they say, and I'd rather not nag my Brazilian friends for one for something they're probably not that interested in. :P

[Noiser]

@Dark Pulse

At 12:22:
-"Our challange was basically that: there is this title Duke Nukem 3D on the pc, now go figure it out how to do it on a Mega Drive in a way that looks cool. But it was from scratch. It was totally from scratch."
(...)
-"Heriberto tested renderization techniques, I also studied the best strategies and Maurício studied the BSP algorithym to create walls on rectangular ambients, different from Wolfenstein that only used squares(...). We tried to create rooms simulating tridimentional spaces in a way that could be faster and with a good performance(...) and that's why textures are rendered that way, it may not look good on modern LCD televisions, but we had to make it that way or the game would not work at all(...)

At 15:40:
-"You can see the way how it was made here. We draw the first sketches on paper and then we made some insane calculations with it. The project took 14 months to be made."

-"So the engine was entirely made inside Tectoy, in-house? You guys made it using assets that already existed but not copying a pre-existing game? Because some people are questioning here if the game used the Zero Tolerance engine."
- "No, not at all.
- "So it's a myth?"
- Totally, it's a myth. People make a lot of assumptions and some of them are taken for granted, but you can see how it was made here. We did it thanks to an insane amount of work, first using the cartesian plane and then properly adequated them with the tool that Maurício created"

-----------------------
Before that they also debunked the theory said by the Tectoy CEO, that the game was made using the Phantasy Star engine (which never made much sense to begin with). They don't think he tried to lie though, they believe it was just a mistake and maybe he misremembered what really happened. 
 

Spoiler

There are a lot of other insights and interesting stuff about the game development on the video. On 29:13 he shown an e-mail by Sega of Japan saying that the game passed on their test with the highest possible rank (AA), which is really cool imo. He also said he had to code and playtest the game all by himself, which is probably why the difficulty ended being so high, but he was happy because they were able to finish it without any significative bugs.

For a project made by just three people, in a country that (at the time) doesn't had much experience with game development, I think they made a great job. If they had a proper playtester, artist and musician, I think the game could've been a lot better.

 

Edited December 17, 2020 by Noiser

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, Noiser said:

Before that they also debunked the theory said by the Tectoy CEO, that the game was made using the Phantasy Star engine (which never made much sense to begin with). They don't think he tried to lie though, they believe it was just a mistake and maybe he misremembered what really happened. 

That'd be extremely weird, considering that only the first Phantasy Star (on the Sega Master System) had the first-person dungeon stuff - 2-4 absolutely didn't, but even weirder in that there was a 16-bit title that did the first-person dungeon exploration thing too (specifically, Shining in the Darkness).

 

Thanks for the translation though!

[viti95]

On 12/3/2020 at 8:07 AM, Death Egg said:

Seems someone else has done a half working Sega Genesis port, and have released the source this time:

It's written entirely in C rather than using Assembly, and it runs at an unplayable frame rate with a terrible palette, but it's the best attempt I've seen yet.

 

I think it's possible to run Doom way faster with that cartridge (Cyclone IV FPGA + 16Mb PSRAM), it's a shame the cartridge itself it's too pricey.

[Dark Pulse]

10 hours ago, viti95 said:

I think it's possible to run Doom way faster with that cartridge (Cyclone IV FPGA + 16Mb PSRAM), it's a shame the cartridge itself it's too pricey.

To be fair, he did say he didn't have time to work on it anymore and he felt it could be improved, too.

 

It's pretty much a quick-and-dirty, unoptimized PoC. Someone with the knowhow/interest/care could surely fix it up and get it at least minimally playable.

 

The real challenge will be squeezing that sort of performance onto some stock Genesis hardware.

[scalliano]

On 7/28/2020 at 11:17 PM, Boaby Kenobi said:

 

That's very impressive for MD. I thought Zero Tolerance was as good as it gets for the Mega Drive.

There's also Bloodshot/Battle Frenzy, which is arguably more technically impressive, though whether it's a better game is debatable.

[Death Egg]

 

Extremely impressed. The only enhancements are the FPGA chip on the Everdrive Pro and the SSF2 mapper to expand the ROM size, otherwise this is all the Genesis. The fact they got the 256 palette to work and the COLORMAP as well given the strict palette limitations on the console... extremely impressive!

[Dimon12321]

What? Genesis runs a nearly original version of Doom and at a decent framerare!??? I have 2 ideas on this one. Either the technologies jumped extremely high these years and the author is an true master of porting and optimizing, or it's a fake video, because it looks TOO optimized!! A homebrew version of Wolfenstein 3D with interlaced textures runs at ~20 fps which is great comparing to, let's say, Zero Tolerance, but at least it's plausible comparing to this video. 

Edited January 16, 2021 by Dimon12321