PSX Doom is actually really good

[Midway64]

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

Oh, it remains very much doable, but since death is much more punishing now and there is no way to save your progress (and I keep accidentally resetting the game on my Playstation Portable), even some of the early maps can be quite difficult to deal with.

 

Quick tip, PlayStation Doom will give you a password on the bottom of the intermission screen and typing a password will load you in the start of the map with all your stats, write down these on a blank page, these may seem strange, but it's how it has always been on old console games without memory card support nor batteries on the cartridge.

 

Most old games with saving actually saved a password as those were much lightweight than actual data.

Edited May 26, 2023 by ValveMercenary

[Rudolph]

Ah! I did not know that. Thanks!

 

I am familiar with some old console games relying on passwords, but since the PS1 used memory cards, I would have expected Playstation Doom to feature a more conventional save function. I mean, Super Metroid and Link To The Past had one and they were both on the SNES!

Edited May 26, 2023 by Rudolph

[Dark Pulse]

9 hours ago, Rudolph said:

@Dark Pulse Do you know if Master Edition's final release intends to address the vanilla bugs as well? I noticed a few so far, like the right pillar that will not lower itself during the Baron of Hell ambush in MAP13: Command Center.

I do not know, though I do know some fixes and improvements were made. (For example, walls can now be above 256 units vertically without the texture stretching.)

 

The challenge there is that before such a fix could be applied, it must be tested for regression - in other words, "If we fix this thing, does it break something else that explicitly breaks this other thing that depended on it being broken?"

 

If it's just an obviously wrong linedef or something, that's one thing. That said, GEC has stated repeatedly that a "combined" release will be its own separate thing from Master Edition (which will just cover cut content or content that came out since by notable people involved in the original games), so that's not really something that applies here either way.

 

6 hours ago, Rudolph said:

I am familiar with some old console games relying on passwords, but since the PS1 used memory cards, I would have expected Playstation Doom to feature a more conventional save function. I mean, Super Metroid and Link To The Past had one and they were both on the SNES!

Believe it or not, not everyone had a memory card back in the day. The PlayStation did not come with one; they were only sold seperately for like $25-30 each if memory serves, and again, this was a near-launch title (The PS1 released in North America on September 9, 1995 - Doom was released barely two months later on November 16), so basically they assumed that many people might not have memory cards, plus it was a transition phase from 16-bit (where passwords were very common since most cartridges didn't have battery-backed SRAM to save progress) to 32-bit (where by the end of it games more or less assumed you had a memory card).

 

That said, do note that PSX Doom doesn't store your status exactly as it was. Health and Armor amounts, in particular tend to be rounded up to the next highest 25%, and ammo can be rounded up in the same way as well (based on how much of it you have in terms of eighths of maximum capacity). But it will keep track of your difficulty, armor type (if any), weapons possessed, and if you have a backpack or not perfectly.

 

If you'd like the dirty details, this spills all the beans: https://classicdoom.com/hosted/lpalin/ps1pwfaq.htm

 

Also: Note you can get your current password at any time by pausing the game, pressing Select (i.e; the automap key), and choosing "Password." You do not need to wait for the intermission screen to obtain one.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Dark Pulse

[Rudolph]

1 hour ago, Dark Pulse said:

Also: Note you can get your current password at any time by pausing the game, pressing Select (i.e; the automap key), and choosing "Password." You do not need to wait for the intermission screen to obtain one.

Yeah, but that requires me to carry a pen and some paper wherever I go. -_-

 

Anyway, the Playstation Portable also requires a memory card to save progress. I was lucky to be able to track a second-hand one, because the PSP I found did not come with one. This kind of bullshit makes me miss my old Game Boy: every game I owned for it had a save function!

Edited May 26, 2023 by Rudolph

[Dark Pulse]

12 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Yeah, but that requires me to carry a pen and some paper wherever I go. -_-

 

Anyway, the Playstation Portable also requires a memory card to save progress. I was lucky to be able to track a second-hand one, because the PSP I found did not come with one. This kind of bullshit makes me miss my old Game Boy: every game I owned for it had a save function!

Assuming your PSP is jailbroken (no reason not to at this point - it's trivial to do so), there are plenty of screenshot plugins that you could use to solve that problem.

 

Also, yeah, you do (unless you have a PSP Go, which comes with 16 GB of onboard storage), but in reality, that's really just buying a cheap-ass Memory Stick, or an even cheaper Memory Stick adapter and some sort of SD/MicroSD storage.

 

Granted, that's just how modern tech is nowadays. And the upshot of that that you seem to be forgetting is that those batteries inside the cartridges can, and eventually do, die - replacing them generally requires disassembling the cartridge casing, desoldering the old battery, and soldering in a new one, either directly or (if there's room) via soldering in a holder.

 

A modern memory device, on the other hand, is solid state storage, so in theory it should stay good for quite awhile. Also, you can easily transfer that save to another device and continue the game there, whereas good luck getting your save data off of a cartridge (generally you would need to purchase a cartridge dumper to do it, and writing it back to the cartridge would be even harder).

 

Lastly, I remember more than a few Game Boy games that used passwords to save progress. Remember: Battery-backed SRAM added costs to the cartridge, so not every game used it.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Dark Pulse

[Rudolph]

55 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

Lastly, I remember more than a few Game Boy games that used passwords to save progress. Remember: Battery-backed SRAM added costs to the cartridge, so not every game used it.

I must have been lucky, then. Aside from Tetris and maybe another one, all the Game Boy games I had had a save function.

 

Anyway, I would not call the lack of a conventional save function in Playstation Doom a problem per se; it can be inconvenient at times, but that makes the game feel more like a survival horror, which is nice. I am mostly ranting about the weird ways technology has evolved - or in the Playstation Portable's case, remained mostly the same. Even though I never had the chance to play Doom on an actual Playstation 1, I did get to play quite a few other games on that console - including the technologically-superior Quake II, which must have been quite a feat, given how truncated Doom had to be to run on the console - and as such, I cannot help but be amazed to find myself being able to play those games on a handheld console only slightly bigger than my smartphone. I know I should not, since I have been using emulators for decades, but his is the very first time I get to play console games on a device that is actually smaller than the platform they were designed for.

Edited May 27, 2023 by Rudolph

[Individualised]

18 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

A modern memory device, on the other hand, is solid state storage, so in theory it should stay good for quite awhile.

Modern flash chips tend to last as long as the batteries found in older video game cartridges

[Dark Pulse]

2 hours ago, Individualised said:

Modern flash chips tend to last as long as the batteries found in older video game cartridges

Depends on use-case. Obviously something not written to very often is going to last longer.

[Individualised]

13 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

Depends on use-case. Obviously something not written to very often is going to last longer.

This isn't true at least for what Nintendo uses in their 3DS cartridges, those are already beginning to fail. Using them more often can keep them alive as it refreshes the memory cells, but many 3DS cartridges that have just been laying around have died as charges have escaped the memory cells. The same issue has been happening with Wii U NANDs, rendering many consoles useless.

Edited May 27, 2023 by Individualised

[TasAcri]

Another quirk in this version is the low frame rate of the doors and elevators.

Edited May 27, 2023 by TasAcri

[Midway64]

8 minutes ago, TasAcri said:

Another quirk in this version is the low frame rate of the doors and elevators.

Actually, this applies to everything, correct me if I'm wrong, but the tickrate of the PSX version is at 15 ticks per second (probably inherited from Jaguar) and since there's no interpolation, everything will be slower unless the states have been modified (which id/Midway did with most enemies and objects).

[Rudolph]

Speaking of low frame rate, after spending a week or so only playing Playstation Doom on Playstation Portable, I have resumed playing Doom on my gaming PC and it really feels like the game is in fast foward or something. XD

[Midway64]

2 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Speaking of low frame rate, after spending a week or so only playing Playstation Doom on Playstation Portable, I have resumed playing Doom on my gaming PC and it really feels like the game is in fast foward or something. XD

Yeah, it does get like that after playing a survival-horror oriented, slow-paced first person shooter port of a fast-paced hard metal shooter.

I play PSX Doom with the PsyDoom source port (with all compatibility options enabled) on PC, really nice, has extra features, limit removal, you get the point.

[Individualised]

15 hours ago, TasAcri said:

Another quirk in this version is the low frame rate of the doors and elevators.

Frame rate has a specific meaning.

Edited May 28, 2023 by Individualised

[TasAcri]

4 hours ago, Individualised said:

Frame rate has a specific meaning.

 

I mean they move very jerkily, like they operate at a lower frame rate than the rest of the game.

[Rudolph]

You know, given how truncated Doom was on Playstation, it makes me wonder how it was possible to port Quake and Quake II to the console in the first place. Is it because developers eventually became better equipped and more adept at working with the Playstation 1 specs?

Edited May 29, 2023 by Rudolph

[Individualised]

29 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

You know, given how truncated Doom was on Playstation, it makes me wonder how it was possible to port Quake and Quake II to the console in the first place. Is it because developers eventually became better equipped and more adept at working with the Playstation 1 specs?

Quake was never on PS1 (it would have been a port of the Saturn version anyway, which uses an engine called Slavedriver that resembles The Build Engine/Duke 3D more than Quake as I understand it), and Quake 2 is a completely original engine.

Edited May 29, 2023 by Individualised

[Rudolph]

56 minutes ago, Individualised said:

Quake was never on PS1 (it would have been a port of the Saturn version anyway, which uses an engine called Slavedriver that resembles The Build Engine/Duke 3D more than Quake as I understand it), and Quake 2 is a completely original engine.

So you think Williams would have been capable of producing a more accurate Doom port with a different engine?

 

Which reminds me: with all the efforts to expand and improve the 32X and GBA ports, is there a project to make a PS1 port that is more faithful to the PC version, i.e. with untruncated maps, full bestiary and Bobby Prince soundtracks?

Edited May 29, 2023 by Rudolph

[Individualised]

1 minute ago, Rudolph said:

So you think Williams would have been capable of producing a more accurate Doom port with a different engine?

That would mean it's less accurate.

[Rudolph]

25 minutes ago, Individualised said:

That would mean it's less accurate.

So it is the other way around and the Doom engine was not optimized for the Playstation?

[Individualised]

1 minute ago, Rudolph said:

So it is the other way around and the Doom engine was not optimized for the Playstation?

Correct. PSX Doom was likely made in a little amount of time (probably as a side project to Doom 64) and they just didn't have enough time to get everything right. Also probably the reason for the weird hybrid renderer instead of it having a true hardware renderer (though maybe Carmack wouldn't have wanted that as he didn't with Saturn Doom - which had Carmack not interfered would have been the only 90s console port based on the PC version)

[Rudolph]

17 minutes ago, Individualised said:

Correct. PSX Doom was likely made in a little amount of time (probably as a side project to Doom 64) and they just didn't have enough time to get everything right. Also probably the reason for the weird hybrid renderer instead of it having a true hardware renderer (though maybe Carmack wouldn't have wanted that as he didn't with Saturn Doom - which had Carmack not interfered would have been the only 90s console port based on the PC version)

Ah. So a 1:1 port is possible then? Or is the Playstation 1 still just not powerful enough to run Doom/Doom II without some cuts and alterations?

[Individualised]

37 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Ah. So a 1:1 port is possible then? Or is the Playstation 1 still just not powerful enough to run Doom/Doom II without some cuts and alterations?

Possibly? I'm not too familiar with the PlayStation 1 hardware so I wouldn't know for sure but the Nintendo 64 can do it. I mean Saturn Doom was meant to be a port of the PC version and the Saturn is much less powerful than the PS1.

Edited May 29, 2023 by Individualised

[Rudolph]

Either way, I take it from our conversation that such thing has yet to be done. Oh well.

 

I admit, even since I have started experimenting with the Playstation Portable, I have been learned to greatly appreciate the efforts of dedicated fans to expand and improve upon existing ports. It is just a shame that none of those consoles are being made anymore, which greatly limit players' access to them, but it is still cool for those who already own them. And in the GBA's case, it means that I can play GBA Doom on an emulator without having to worry about causing non-gaming computers to freeze - something that has been happening a lot to me when I stayed at some people's house during the early days of the pandemic. For some reason, their computer could not even handle Freedoom or even Retro Doom for too long... :S

[Spocks_Beard]

PSX Doom has been my preferred version ever since I got a copy nearly a decade ago. The lights, new sounds and more ambient music just do it for me. Plus more of a controller guy anyways.

[Dark Pulse]

18 hours ago, Individualised said:

Correct. PSX Doom was likely made in a little amount of time (probably as a side project to Doom 64) and they just didn't have enough time to get everything right. Also probably the reason for the weird hybrid renderer instead of it having a true hardware renderer (though maybe Carmack wouldn't have wanted that as he didn't with Saturn Doom - which had Carmack not interfered would have been the only 90s console port based on the PC version)

Neither of these are correct.

 

First, Doom 64 was directly built off of the PSX Doom codebase. It's fairly obvious when you look at the reversed code for both games.

 

Second: There is no "partial hardware" stuff on PSX Doom. It's all done in full hardware, just in a weird way. Rendering pixel-wide polygonal strips is what allows the game to avoid the affine texture swim that Carmack hated, but it also means that a hell of a lot of polys are being pushed and rendered to do it, and this is what is tanking the performance of the engine. Devs hadn't thought things like increasing poly LOD as you got closer to a surface yet (again, this game came out two months after launch), so a lot of the trickery that was done in a late-era PS1 game like Quake II simply hadn't been discovered yet.

 

Also, while there was some limits that would have complicated things due to how they wrote the renderer, I'm pretty sure that if that were rewritten and improved, there wouldn't be any technical reason that the original map geometry couldn't be restored. The main issues are that textures don't tile on the vertical axis more than once (which GEC has fixed) and that large or tall rooms kill performance hard (which is due to how the renderer renders in strips of polys, overdraw, etc.).

 

If that could be fixed, missing textures got restored, and the map limits pushed to Final Doom spec, I'm pretty sure at least the OG maps could be made to run just fine. Textures might have to differ due to limited VRAM space, however, and custom maps would probably still have a problem, of course - IIRC the first map limit that would usually get hit would be Sidedefs.

Edited May 30, 2023 by Dark Pulse

[Individualised]

20 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

First, Doom 64 was directly built off of the PSX Doom codebase. It's fairly obvious when you look at the reversed code for both games.

People say this a lot but... is this actually true? Doom 64 started development soon after Doom 2 was released, in late 1994. Was PSX Doom already in development at that point? It released in late 1995. I get the impression that it was the other way round. Doomwiki seems to explain how this happened; they didn't have a devkit yet so started development on a PlayStation version as a stopgap.

 

20 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

Second: There is no "partial hardware" stuff on PSX Doom. It's all done in full hardware, just in a weird way. Rendering pixel-wide polygonal strips is what allows the game to avoid the affine texture swim that Carmack hated, but it also means that a hell of a lot of polys are being pushed and rendered to do it, and this is what is tanking the performance of the engine. Devs hadn't thought things like increasing poly LOD as you got closer to a surface yet (again, this game came out two months after launch), so a lot of the trickery that was done in a late-era PS1 game like Quake II simply hadn't been discovered yet.

 

Also, while there was some limits that would have complicated things due to how they wrote the renderer, I'm pretty sure that if that were rewritten and improved, there wouldn't be any technical reason that the original map geometry couldn't be restored. The main issues are that textures don't tile on the vertical axis more than once (which GEC has fixed) and that large or tall rooms kill performance hard (which is due to how the renderer renders in strips of polys, overdraw, etc.).

 

If that could be fixed, missing textures got restored, and the map limits pushed to Final Doom spec, I'm pretty sure at least the OG maps could be made to run just fine. Textures might have to differ due to limited VRAM space, however, and custom maps would probably still have a problem, of course - IIRC the first map limit that would usually get hit would be Sidedefs.

That's exactly what I meant by "partial hardware"; it's using the hardware to render things but it's doing it in the way the software renderer would. Though I wasn't sure if it was due to time limits or if it was because of Carmack.

Edited May 30, 2023 by Individualised

[Rudolph]

So would it have been a wiser decision to port Doom 1 first and then Doom 2?

[Individualised]

3 hours ago, Rudolph said:

So would it have been a wiser decision to port Doom 1 first and then Doom 2?

It doesn't really make a difference because the games are so similar and PS1 Doom is based on the Jaguar version which was already a weird mix of codebases.

[Rudolph]

11 minutes ago, Individualised said:

It doesn't really make a difference because the games are so similar and PS1 Doom is based on the Jaguar version which was already a weird mix of codebases.

Sure, but clearly the developers had yet to figure out how to properly implement the Arch-Vile and the Icon of Sin, so by focusing on developing a complete port of Doom 1 first, maybe they could have given themselves more time to figure out how to do it?

 

I mean, 36 maps is still plenty, not to mention the extra post-Thy Flesh Consumed maps.