Doom PC ports

[Alfonso]

Everyone loves to discuss the console ports and their differences but there is little discussion about the ports for other operating systems.

Let's talk about the ones you have played or know about.

Do you find them inferior/superior to the DOS version?

For me it's Doom95.

[Dark Pulse]

I wouldn't list Doom 64 there, it's not really a port like all the others.

 

I played Doom95 back in the day, and yeah, it was... interesting.

 

The thing about most of those ports is that they're relatively faithful, so there's not very much to comment about them.

[Alfonso]

I'm very interested in the RISC OS port.

It has enough features to be compared to other source ports.

Even includes an internal clock to know when it's time to stop dooming.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oiLSsOb_9gI

They are like three versions of it, i think (Doom+) and they still selling an updated one for newer systems 20 years later.

Does anyone own it?

[Nikku4211]

1 hour ago, Dark Pulse said:

I wouldn't list Doom 64 there, it's not really a port like all the others.

The article's listing the port of Doom 64 to the PC.

[Teo Slayer]

There's DOOM for PC-98? Does that mean I can play DOOM on Neko Project II?

[Kinsie]

Is there any specific ones you want to talk about, OP?

 

1 hour ago, Teo Slayer said:

There's DOOM for PC-98? Does that mean I can play DOOM on Neko Project II?

There is, and you can, but your milage may vary.

 

Versions I've played are marked on startup as v1.2j1.0 (Doom 1) and v1.9j1.2 (Doom 2). They appear to be more or less identical to their English MS-DOS counterparts content-wise, except the small red font used for HUD messages is given the boot in favor of the generic DOS font rendering at twice the resolution as the rest of the screen (a PC-98 hardware party trick) for additional clarity to in-game messages.

 

 

FM synth handling of the MUS music seems a bit different from how MS-DOS Adlib handles it, General MIDI sounds about the same. Audio has a bad habit of being punctuated by short, sharp, high-pitched beeps at random intervals (especially in FM synth music mode).

Edited September 19, 2021 by Kinsie

[Dark Pulse]

9 hours ago, Nikku4211 said:

The article's listing the port of Doom 64 to the PC.

Yes, but all the others (and the tone of the OP's post) is talking about ports of the PC original to other platforms. Hence my comment.

5 hours ago, Kinsie said:

Is there any specific ones you want to talk about, OP?

 

There is, and you can, but your milage may vary.

 

Versions I've played are marked on startup as v1.2j1.0 (Doom 1) and v1.9j1.2 (Doom 2). They appear to be more or less identical to their English MS-DOS counterparts content-wise, except the small red font used for HUD messages is given the boot in favor of the generic DOS font rendering at twice the resolution as the rest of the screen (a PC-98 hardware party trick) for additional clarity to in-game messages.

 

 

FM synth handling of the MUS music seems a bit different from how MS-DOS Adlib handles it, General MIDI sounds about the same. Audio has a bad habit of being punctuated by short, sharp, high-pitched beeps at random intervals (especially in FM synth music mode).

I remember checking the WAD file of one of the PC-98 versions and it was identical down to the checksum, so the only real different data would be in the executable.

[Nikku4211]

10 hours ago, Kinsie said:

except the small red font used for HUD messages is given the boot in favor of the generic DOS font rendering at twice the resolution as the rest of the screen (a PC-98 hardware party trick) for additional clarity to in-game messages.

That does make sense, due to the visual complexity of kanji needing the extra resolution.

 

What really bugs me is everything using the wrong aspect ratio(since 640x400 in PC-98 typically uses square pixels), but that's to be expected since it'd be hard to properly scale and correct aspect ratio on such a low resolution like 640x400. And I'm sure a lot of PC-98 CRTs can already adjust screen proportion anyway.

10 hours ago, Kinsie said:

FM synth handling of the MUS music seems a bit different from how MS-DOS Adlib handles it, General MIDI sounds about the same.

Hm, General MIDI sounds about the same as Adlib?

 

You mean aside from the general differences between the PC-98's OPNA and the Adlib's OPL2?

4 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Yes, but all the others (and the tone of the OP's post) is talking about ports of the PC original to other platforms. Hence my comment.

Your comment sounded like you thought it was referring to Doom 64 in general, erroneously calling it a port of the PC original to N64. I don't know, I read it weird.

[Dark Pulse]

2 hours ago, Nikku4211 said:

Your comment sounded like you thought it was referring to Doom 64 in general, erroneously calling it a port of the PC original to N64. I don't know, I read it weird.

Yeah, it definitely wasn't. There is, of course, homebrew versions that do that (64Doom), but I know full well Doom 64 is its own game and not a direct port of the PC original. :P