DOOM Arcade!

[Chip]

looking at the DOOM Wiki, I found this, a fake arcade cabinet from some movie I've never heard of where you can play DOOM 2! I was interested in this, until I found out it never existed. this was just a prop for a movie, and it was never actually made into a game. With this info, I thought I never would see a DOOM Arcade machine. Suddenly, it came to me! DOOM has been ported to a calculator, a printer, and so much more, so why wouldn't it be able to be ported to a machine that was made to run games?! It does not have to be an official release to be an amazing idea! How fun would it be to go to like a local arcade (if they still exist) or a friends house, and be able to play a cabinet of your favorite game? It would be amazing! So, I took my time to create a small idea for a cabinet. Please, if anybody can do coding and stuff out there (because I can’t) that would be great! I would love to see this creation come to life! With some of my help, and a huge help from the community, I believe we can come up with an amazing idea. So far these are the notes I’ve made, they aren’t great, I just took some time to make them. I separated them into "pages," but they are all just bullet points. take your time to read them, there are probably many grammar mistakes, but it already took like 3 hours to come up with all of it, so I'm going to just use what I have. 

 

Page 1: Cabinet outside look

  Reveal hidden contents

• Arcade cabinet has a joystick with a Fire and USE button on the sides, prev. And next weapon , toggle RUN, and AREA MAP
• The play area has a sticker that makes it look like wires and tech stuff
• Arcade sticker at top that says DOOM
• Arcade sticker on side of DOOM game cover, cropped to only show a few demon hands and the doom marine
• Color: orange

Here is a really rough pic of what the game board (whatever it is called) would look like based on my description.

 

Page 2: Gameplay

  Reveal hidden contents

• When idle, play the gameplay normally seen in the background of a startup 
• On entering, the background will be the regular DOOM startup picture
• Four options- New Game, Level select, options, High Scores
• Move skull with joystick, choose with fire, back with use
• Options: options gives you the option to change brightness, turn autorun on or off, and the usual audio settings
• High Scores- there is a selection between TIME, and SCORE (more on page 3)
• NEW GAME- choose skills ITYTD, HMP, or UV. Allows you to play Shareware of DOOM 1 levels 1-9 (9 within a secret exit) chronologically, you cannot skip levels, to do that, choose level select. this allows the HIGH SCORE mode activated (more on page 3)
• Level Select: choose skills ITYTD, HMP, or UV. Select any levels 1-9 from the Shareware of DOOM 1. Levels do not continue, to continue, play NEW GAME. This allows TIME SCORE mode activated (more on page 3)
• If die, restart level with pistol start
• There is no way to save, so in NEW GAME, you must play all the way through to the end.
• On level finish in NEW GAME, show score for that level. Show time it took. Does not show par but shows how many secrets you have found/items picked up/demons killed
• On level finished in level select, show the time it took. Show the par. Does not show how many secrets you have found/items picked up/demons killed
• If new high score reached in NEW GAME or Level Select, show screen with letters A-Z. use the joystick to choose a letter, and click FIRE to verify the letter, then go to next letter. Click USE to go back a letter. After 3 letters typed, show the name in the High Score menu.

• Within Level Select, Health is replaced with TIMER

• TIMER is set to 30 seconds, Way too little for any level

• When timer reaches 0, Death animation plays

• TIMER resets for every level

• Hold use to strafe

 

Page 3: Scoring

  Reveal hidden contents

• There are 2 scorings TIME and SCORE
• Choosing TIME, brings you to a menu to choose a level. Choosing a level lets you see the top 10 plays in time with the players initials for that level. 
• First 10 on first time booting up machine are AAA, BBB, CCC, etc. until JJJ. JJJ being the lowest. AAA being the highest. It goes in increments of PAR * 2, so BBB in Map 1 is 1:00, while AAA is 00:30 
• Choosing SCORE, brings you to a menu to choose a level. Choosing a level lets you see the top 10 plays in Score with the players initials for that level. 
• First 10 on first time booting up machine are AAA, BBB, CCC, etc. until JJJ. JJJ being the lowest. AAA being the highest. It goes in increments of -500, so JJJ is 500, while AAA is 5000
• For Score, numbers go up by demons killed, items picked up, and secrets found

HIGH SCORE SUBSECTION-

• If 100% kills, pick ups and secrets, found, give 1000 point bonus
• For SCORE with demons, the health of the demon gives the same points. E.G. Baron has 1000 health, so when killed, give 1000 points
• Health pickups and armor pickups give the same points for amount given. E.G. Mega armor gives 200 armor, so get 200 points. (health does not double points in ITYTD, only health, so a medkit only gives 25 points, not 50)
• Ammo pickups give as followed, clip, 4 shotgun shells, rocket- 20 points, box of bullets, shotgun shells, and rockets- 50 points
• Weapon pickups give as followed, shotgun- 50 points, chaingun- 100 points, chainsaw- 100 points, rocket launcher- 200 points (if picked up again after obtaining, give ¼ of normal points)
• Secrets give 100 points each
• Backpacks, radiation suit, visors, blurs, and key cards give 100 points each
• Computer area maps give 250 points
• Finishing a level gives 200 points
• Finding the secret level adds 300 points to the finishing level, so instead of 200 points, the player acquires 500 points.

TIME SUBSECTION-

• For TIME with demons, give time back by demon tier (when hit). Zombieman/shotgunner/Imp= 5 sec, Demon/spectre= 10 sec, baron= 20 sec.

• Health pickups and armor pickups give back time based on tier. Armor/health bonus= 3 sec, stimpack= 5 sec, medkit= 7 sec, green armor= 10 sec, supercharge/mega armor= 15 sec

• Ammo pickups give as followed, clip, 4 shotgun shells, rocket- 3 sec, box of bullets, shotgun shells, and rockets- 6 sec

• Weapon pickups give as followed, shotgun- 5 sec, chaingun/saw- 10 sec, rocket launcher- 15 sec (if picked up again after obtaining, give about ½ of normal time)

• Secrets give 10 secs each

• Backpacks, radiation suit, visors, blurs, and key cards give 7 sec each

• Computer area maps give 20 sec

• Finding the secret level gives 15 sec back to player

• Zombieman shot takes away 3 secs, Imp= 5 sec, shotgun guy= 10 sec, Demon/spectre= 15 sec, Baron= 20 sec (when demons hit you)

 

Please, any help would be amazing! Please give some of your ideas by commenting them below! In time, I believe as a community, we can create the greatest arcade machine of all time! Please correct me on anything you believe is wrong. I imagine there to be typos and stuff, since this took me hours to write. Thank you so much! follow page to get caught up on latest content! 

Edited July 29, 2020 by LiT_gam3r

[MFG38]

Only question I have is, who in the Doom community is rich enough to buy the cabinet?

[Redneckerz]

Quake had an arcade port as Arcade Tournament Edition. It used Obsidian 3DFX hardware for the visuals. A comprehensive blogspot is here.
 

But into your thread:

  On 7/27/2020 at 12:50 AM, LiT_gam3r said:

DOOM has been ported to a calculator, a printer, and so much more, so why wouldn't it be able to be ported to a machine that was made to run games?!

Expand  

You could likely place a standard PC into a custom made cabinet and auto configure it with a Launcher, Doom 2 and all of /idgames on a SSD of some sorts. But you still would need a coin-op and JAMMA harness for that to work.

Even then, you will need to modify the controls to accept arcade sticks as input controllers, if ports do not accept such input already.

But this is not official arcade hardware by any means.

 

  Quote

How fun would it be to go to like a local arcade (if they still exist) or a friends house, and be able to play a cabinet of your favorite game? It would be amazing! So, I took my time to create a small idea for a cabinet.

Expand  

Okay.... surely you aren't an Ideas Guy, right?
 

  Quote

Please, if anybody can do coding and stuff out there (because I can’t) that would be great!

Expand  

Here is where the idea falls flat. A custom arcade cabinet to solely run Doom and its many PWADS is a great idea actually (And i am surprised nobody has attempted one yet) but the idea itself is a huge time/cost sink. Making your own cabinet is very time consuming. Configuring Doom for it equally so. If you want a geniune experience (As in, it has to accept coins) then even more so.

I figure ScoreDoom or ScoreDoomST has to be used as a basis for it (Since it has a scoring system already).

Its a huge amount of effort for what is rather little gain: Arcades are mostly found in big shopping malls and aren't that omnipresent as they were in the 90s, and for a local friends group, you may aswell get a mancave first to put that cabinet in.

I can imagine this being a good fit for QuakeCon, however.

This is not me raining on your parade for all the hard work you have put into drafting this, but you have to realize that this project is very, very time consuming.
 

  On 7/27/2020 at 9:15 AM, MFG38 said:

Only question I have is, who in the Doom community is rich enough to buy the cabinet?

Expand  

Very few because the cost/playability is rather nonsensical: You probably will need to be in contact with arcade halls to even facilitate a thing like this.*

^{*That is if arcade hardware of this kind existed, which it does not.}

Edited July 27, 2020 by Redneckerz

[Chip]

  On 7/27/2020 at 9:52 AM, Redneckerz said:

This is not me raining on your parade for all the hard work you have put into drafting this, but you have to realize that this project is very, very time consuming.

Expand  

I get that. I have a few ideas that I love to share with the community. You remember my Atari DOOM idea, right? I just like to share things that I come up with, see if anybody enjoys my idea. It's also fun for me to make these up, as it's a topic I love, and I can, and did spend hours doing research and having a blast doing this! Thank you for reading it and responding to it!

[Redneckerz]

  On 7/27/2020 at 4:52 PM, LiT_gam3r said:

I get that. I have a few ideas that I love to share with the community. You remember my Atari DOOM idea, right? I just like to share things that I come up with, see if anybody enjoys my idea. It's also fun for me to make these up, as it's a topic I love, and I can, and did spend hours doing research and having a blast doing this! Thank you for reading it and responding to it!

Expand  

I mean, whatever floats your boat, if you enjoy making these things, go for it. But in the end, they are just ideas, although this particular one does have my interest :)

[Boaby Kenobi]

Just play Doom on an old CRT TV and use an arcade stick. Smoking is optional for added "authenticity".

[Maes]

There was an old thread somewhere which explored the idea of "arcade FPS" in general. If one does the research, they'll find that most of the existing ones are actually rail shooters or vehicular sims of sorts. This is not by chance, as those game configurations do solve some inherent problems of true free-form FPS mechanics that don't translate well to an arcade setting. The most important one is the controls (to give you full mouse + WASD-like mobility with separate strafe keys, one would need to employ a combination of analog joysticks, pedals, and a LOT of buttons...or make you drive a tank), the ability to explore freely and the lack of time limit (what if a player just says screw those mission objectives and plants Doomguy somewhere staring at a wall for hours with one credit?).

[Redneckerz]

  On 7/28/2020 at 7:11 AM, Maes said:

There was an old thread somewhere which explored the idea of "arcade FPS" in general. If one does the research, they'll find that most of the existing ones are actually rail shooters or vehicular sims of sorts.

Expand  

There are only a few FPS games in arcade. Off the top of my head:

• Quake: Arcade Tournament Edition
• Counter-Strike Neo
• Half-Life 2: Survivor
• Cyber Diver
• Outtrigger
• War: Final Assault (A Quake 3 like clone)

ArcadeHeroes has had a 2013 article discussing the history of these games and mentions Quake: Arcade Tournament Edition.

Edited July 28, 2020 by Redneckerz

[Maes]

  On 7/28/2020 at 10:40 AM, Redneckerz said:

ArcadeHeroes has had a 2013 article discussing the history of these games and mentions Quake: Arcade Tournament Edition.

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Yes, that's the article I had in mind but it pretty much confirms what I said: true FPS games in an arcade setting were always few and far between, being always less successful than rail shooters/light gun games. There are simply a lot of compromises and grey areas to take care of when "porting" to the arcade, and most if not all of these games are ultimately versus combat games that force a specific pace on the player, not (relatively speaking) open-world experiences like Doom was back in its day.

 

Edit: for the same reasons you don't see a lot of other game genres like e.g. RPGs translate well to the arcade. Arcade/action games with RPG elements are one thing, but a full-fledged RPG with its world and character building mechanics....not so much. Unless you try and do it like SNK and make an RPG game with a time limit that could only be extended by inserting more coins -_-. Granted, that's one unusual RPG (motorcycles + RPGs???), and it was meant more as a home title and yet....it existed in a pure arcade form. 10 minutes a coin, when a "perfect run" would take 2 hours, and there was no other way to gain time.

 

Sure, different kind of game, but it just shows how some things you just cannot port to an arcade setting, or shoe-horn them into a coin-munching agenda without ruining the whole game. Can you imagine playing Arcade Doom in increments of 10 minutes, only extendable by inserting more coins? Would give a whole other motivation to speedrunners, that's for sure.... finish an entire episode in one credit maybe? ;-)

Edited July 28, 2020 by Maes

[Redneckerz]

  On 7/28/2020 at 12:55 PM, Maes said:

 

Yes, that's the article I had in mind but it pretty much confirms what I said: true FPS games in an arcade setting were always few and far between, being always less successful than rail shooters/light gun games. There are simply a lot of compromises and grey areas to take care of when "porting" to the arcade, and most if not all of these games are ultimately versus combat games that force a specific pace on the player, not (relatively speaking) open-world experiences like Doom was back in its day.

Expand  

Precisely. In porting an FPS, you are pretty much limited to deathmatch style games - Since those are easily controlled by a coin-op. You could put in a level system and that's that - But anything far fetched would not port over well at all.

So you are at best looking at a hybrid such as this, but that's not really a pure FPS perse.

  46 minutes ago, Maes said:

Sure, different kind of game, but it just shows how some things you just cannot port to an arcade setting, or shoe-horn them into a coin-munching agenda without ruining the whole game. Can you imagine playing Arcade Doom in increments of 10 minutes, only extendable by inserting more coins? Would give a whole other motivation to speedrunners, that's for sure.... finish an entire episode in one credit maybe? ;-)

Expand  

I always thought DoomWare would be a perfect fit for an arcade like experience, primarily because the entire game is divided in 80 mini games.

[Doomkid]

  On 7/28/2020 at 7:11 AM, Maes said:

The most important one is the controls (to give you full mouse + WASD-like mobility with separate strafe keys, one would need to employ a combination of analog joysticks, pedals, and a LOT of buttons...or make you drive a tank)

Expand  

 

every theory for Doom arcade controls I’ve ever seen is so over the top. It could basically be done with a slightly more advanced version of the classic “stick and 6 buttons” layout.

 

All you need are 6 buttons on the left, and a pilot style joystick with a trigger and and thumb button on the right. The 6 buttons in the left would be your WSDA, plus a button for the map and another button to change weapons. The joystick would basically take over for the mouse, but it would have a trigger to shoot and a thumb button to open doors. If you really want to be anal about the controls, you could add one more button on the left for toggling running on and off, or maybe have dedicated next weapon/previous weapon buttons.

 

No pause button or saving or gamma correction type stuff - this is an arcade game, after all!

 

EDIT - added image to make it easier to envision

Edited July 29, 2020 by Doomkid

[Crusader No Regret]

And now I'm picturing a Gauntlet style ticking timer where the player loses health over time independent of anything else.  Maybe revamp the health system to have bigger numbers to support such a mechanic.

[Doomkid]

That would be awesome. Maybe you could even gain 20 seconds every time you find a secret area, or perhaps bigger enemies could give a little time back when killed, since with most good arcade games, a pro only needs a couple bucks tops to get to the end. Would put a really interesting spin on Doom to have a clock that puts pressure on you.

[plums]

 

  On 7/29/2020 at 2:26 AM, Doomkid said:

 

every theory for Doom arcade controls I’ve ever seen is so over the top. It could basically be done with a slightly more advanced version of the classic “stick and 6 buttons” layout. 

 

All you need are 6 buttons on the left, and a pilot style joystick with a trigger and and thumb button on the right. The 6 buttons in the left would be your WSDA, plus a button for the map and another button to change weapons. The joystick would basically take over for the mouse, but it would have a trigger to shoot and a thumb button to open doors. If you really want to be anal about the controls, you could add one more button on the left for toggling running on and off, or maybe have dedicated next weapon/previous weapon buttons.

Expand  

I think this is still too much for an arcade cab. Also joystick on the right is extremely unusual.

 

I think joystick plus pushable spinner would be the way to go, this mimics WASD + mouse pretty well, since you don't actually need a y-axis for looking up and down in Doom. Assuming you're just trying to get a setup for unmodified Doom, you'd want a few extra buttons for open doors, change weapons, etc., but really moving and shooting are the important bits. If you wanted you could use a pilot type stick with some triggers on it; those are usually analog so pushing the joystick halfway in one direction could be walking, and fully could be running.

 

Of course, lots of people including myself played Doom with a Gravis GamePad back in the day, or other controls that use a "strafe on" button. It's not as good as a keyboard+mouse setup, and it's not a very modern style of control, but it's certainly usable.

Edited July 29, 2020 by plums

[Eurisko]

Grosse Point Blank. Good film.

Here's the scene...…..

 

 

[Maes]

  On 7/29/2020 at 2:26 AM, Doomkid said:

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I once tried a purely joystick-based mapping for Doom, using a flight stick as a base. There sure were enough keys for the most important bindings to play with, and since it was a flight-sim stick it also had a twisting rudder (directional input was forward/backwards/left strafe/right stafe, and twisting the stick was rotation). It did work, in the sense that you could take Doomguy anywhere you wanted on the map, but it was slow. The control scheme was exactly the same as a helicopter (directions = cyclic input, twisting = pedals/rudder). It was yes, precise, but not rapid enough for anything more complex than leisurely clearing E1M1.

 

As for your proposed arcade setup...yes, it would work, as it's a direct translation of WASD + mouse over to arcade controls. It would be highly unusual to have keys controlling movement though, and getting used to the idea that the joystick is only for steering, essentially (and looking up/down, if it was implemented). Fire controls on the stick...dunno how long they'd last in an arcade setting. Then again, using a plain arcade stick (just a ball, no buttons) would mean you'd have to position the fire button elsewhere and free at least one control from the hands with pedals, e.g. strafing or turning. Of course, there were also rotary-encoded sticks, so you could have all directional + rotational movement in one stick.

 

The gist of all this is that yes, you can come up with a lot of complete control schemes, in the sense that everything has a binding/analogue. The question is how many of those will be ergonomic/intuitive enough in practice.

[P41R47]

Doom: The Rail Shooter Edition could be an interesting project.

Maybe adding some QTE to the gameplay, some nasty traps, and a scoring system and yay! As a rails shooter, coin consuming is the main target, so a good difficulty and somewhat punisheable gameplay will be good for this. Now we got something here!

 

EDIT: rereading what i wrote, i found that some of the things that could be good for a rail shooter, are some of the things for what Plutonia is criticized sometimes.

So yeah, i second @Jayextee about Plutonia being somewhat like Doom: Arcade Edition.

[Chip]

@Doomkid and @Crusader No Regret, I changed it up a bit. I didn't change it totally, but I was wondering if this is similar to what you mean? Thank you!

 

also, @P41R47, there was actually a DOOM rail-shooter! It was called DOOM Resurrection, released back in 2009 for Iphone. you can no longer get it, though. it acted as a side story to DOOM³, and even used some assets from the game! a trailer was released, which I linked below.