Is there any port of Doom for Virtual Boy or Zeebo?

[Moonie]

I know it's a bit of a random question, but since Doom is always ported to anything it came to my mind which console does not yet have a port of Doom, after seeing the Street Fighter 2 port for Virtual Boy (https://youtu.be/nUChl88zcZE) I was wondering if the console would have enough power to run Doom, there's even a Super Mario Kart homebrew for the Virtual Boy that runs at a much better frame-rate than the SNES, on Zeebo it was after seeing OpenLara running on it ( https://twitter.com/i/status/1520560066969153536 ), I think it's a peculiar case since it as received official PC ports of Quake 1 and 2 and it supports OpenGL ES 1.0 so maybe there is not so much hardware limitation here and furthermore it uses a modified version of BREW 4.0.2 which is not that hard to work with, plus both BREW and Zeebo SDK was made available on the internet so I thought it might already exist, but since it's such an unknown console it probably doesn't exist yet.

 

- https://www.tripleoxygen.net/wiki/console/zeebo/ambiente_de_desenvolvimento
- https://zeebowiki.blogspot.com/2019/02/instalacao-e-configuracao-do-ambiente.html
- https://www.tripleoxygen.net/files/devices/zeebo/doc/

 

I know, both are failed consoles that few people own and even fewer would be able to play these ports, but man... it would be so awesome to see Doom running on these two consoles, I was wondering if there is any project or interest in this and if i can help in any way.

[Dark Pulse]

It could probably be done on Virtual Boy; it had some true 3D stuff after all (Red Alarm). But of course, you'd need some considerable changes to try not to make it look all jacked up, and I doubt that it'd have the horsepower to do textured walls (not to mention that it's technically a grayscale machine).

 

Zeebo would be trivial; the thing literally had an official Quake II port, after all, and the CPU is a 528 MHz ARM11 and a GPU that's essentially an early Adreno. It's fairly low-power, but there's no reason it shouldn't run at least basic Doom flawlessly. Source ports may be another question entirely.

[viti95]

Virtual Boy has a 32-bit cpu running at 20MHz, that is more than enough. The main problem with the Virtual Boy is that it only has 64Kb of WRAM, which is 4 times less compared to the Raspberry Pi Pico, it would require a cartridge with aditional RAM. Also Doom is perfectly playable even with monochrome tones, so it could be done and be visually pleasant.

[Moonie]

On 5/11/2022 at 12:48 AM, Dark Pulse said:

It could probably be done on Virtual Boy; it had some true 3D stuff after all (Red Alarm). But of course, you'd need some considerable changes to try not to make it look all jacked up, and I doubt that it'd have the horsepower to do textured walls (not to mention that it's technically a grayscale machine).

 

Zeebo would be trivial; the thing literally had an official Quake II port, after all, and the CPU is a 528 MHz ARM11 and a GPU that's essentially an early Adreno. It's fairly low-power, but there's no reason it shouldn't run at least basic Doom flawlessly. Source ports may be another question entirely.

Just out of curiosity, but which version of Doom would be the easiest to port to Zeebo or Virtual Boy?

[Dark Pulse]

52 minutes ago, Moonie said:

Just out of curiosity, but which version of Doom would be the easiest to port to Zeebo or Virtual Boy?

Wouldn't really matter for Zeebo. It's got more than enough power, RAM, storage, etc. for full-fat Doom II.

 

Virtual Boy would be trickier. This is 1995 handheld tech, and as said above, RAM (and, IMO, color depth info) would be a major catch.

 

The other major unknown is how big of a ROM the Virtual Boy can handle - the biggest commercial game for it was 2 MB. I've read the limit is 16 MB, but obviously nothing came close to testing that.

Edited May 13, 2022 by Dark Pulse

[viti95]

Color depth shouldn't be a problem, Virtual Boy supports black + 3 shades of red (2-bit per pixel). Just create an optimized colormap + playpal and you're ready to go.

This is a quick'n'dirty edit of how it should look (320x200, resolution on the virtual boy is a little bit bigger, 384x224).

 

 

EDIT: The main issue may be differencing Hell Knights and Barons of Hell. Those should require a sprite modification.

Edited May 13, 2022 by viti95

[Redneckerz]

On 5/11/2022 at 5:31 AM, Moonie said:

I know it's a bit of a random question, but since Doom is always ported to anything it came to my mind which console does not yet have a port of Doom, after seeing the Street Fighter 2 port for Virtual Boy (https://youtu.be/nUChl88zcZE) I was wondering if the console would have enough power to run Doom, there's even a Super Mario Kart homebrew for the Virtual Boy that runs at a much better frame-rate than the SNES, on Zeebo it was after seeing OpenLara running on it

The OpenLara project seems to be a catch-all platform to port to every console ever, with the benefit you can play it as an FPS. The engine there is really versatile.

 

I expect a Zodiac and Gizmondo port aswell (Although the latter will be difficult since there just weren't many Gizmondo's sold)

On 5/11/2022 at 5:31 AM, Moonie said:

 I think it's a peculiar case since it as received official PC ports of Quake 1 and 2 and it supports OpenGL ES 1.0 so maybe there is not so much hardware limitation here and furthermore it uses a modified version of BREW 4.0.2 which is not that hard to work with, plus both BREW and Zeebo SDK was made available on the internet so I thought it might already exist, but since it's such an unknown console it probably doesn't exist yet.

I do know there was a project to get Android 1.5/1.6 running on the Zeebo since the hardware within is a smartphone SOC (Used in the HTC Dream, i believe).

The issue however is BREW. There are BREW 3D games (such as Bioshock 3D!) and i once did ask whether it would be possible to get that ported over considering emulators exist.

 

Technically it should be, but there is just not many Zeebo's around.

 

10 hours ago, Moonie said:

Just out of curiosity, but which version of Doom would be the easiest to port to Zeebo or Virtual Boy?

I'd imagine Doom Legacy would be a good choice - Back in the day Legacy was ported to amany ARM-based phones, pocket PC's and Windows Mobile. As for accelerated Legacy, well, you would need a port with GLES support for it.

 

DoomGLES, perhaps, as that ran on PocketPC's, but you would likely need to skip BREW for it.

 

Zeebo is a great platform though, love to own one one of these days.

[Dark Pulse]

5 hours ago, viti95 said:

Color depth shouldn't be a problem, Virtual Boy supports black + 3 shades of red (2-bit per pixel). Just create an optimized colormap + playpal and you're ready to go.

This is a quick'n'dirty edit of how it should look (320x200, resolution on the virtual boy is a little bit bigger, 384x224).

 

 

EDIT: The main issue may be differencing Hell Knights and Barons of Hell. Those should require a sprite modification.

Yeah, I know the video can technically render the walls. But what I'm wondering more is basically how long it would take to do the actual columnar strips for it. Based on the 3D performance of officially released games, my hunch is the CPU will be just too slow - and that's with wireframe, not textured, walls.

 

 

Throw in other issues, too, such as:

• The aforementioned Baron/Hell Knight differentiation
• Keycard colors
• How do you do a Spectre

None of which are trivial problems to solve!

 

I'm sure they could be if someone were determined, but it'd definitely take some thought.

Edited May 13, 2022 by Dark Pulse

[Redneckerz]

@Moonie:

The Zeebo version of Quake supports custom map loading. With a bit of work, you can run converted Doom 2 levels.

 

 

[SplinkWizard]

On the topic of Zeebo. I heard it uses some kind of Java architecture. Does that mean we could port every Java phone game to the zeebo? I heard the java variants of Prey and Resident evil 4 were ported on there. I'm thinking that maybe we could get a bunch of weird games on it and somehow give life to the games with online multiplayer components.

[Dark Pulse]

22 hours ago, SplinkWizard said:

On the topic of Zeebo. I heard it uses some kind of Java architecture. Does that mean we could port every Java phone game to the zeebo? I heard the java variants of Prey and Resident evil 4 were ported on there. I'm thinking that maybe we could get a bunch of weird games on it and somehow give life to the games with online multiplayer components.

RE4, yes. Prey, I don't think so.

 

Zeebo basically uses BREW, specifically BREW 4. It's not the same thing as Java, but there is some relation to it. It's not so simple to port every Java game over to it though, since (for example) Java is a virtual machine while BREW is not, and BREW also has things like direct hardware access that Java will lack.

[Murdoch]

Doom on the Virtual Boy?!? Are you that big of a masochist?

[Dark Pulse]

19 hours ago, Murdoch said:

Doom on the Virtual Boy?!? Are you that big of a masochist?

Some people enjoy the challenge. I think it'd be a neat one.

 

I just don't know how good of a port it'd be past the "It runs!" stage. :P

[Murdoch]

3 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

Some people enjoy the challenge. I think it'd be a neat one.

 

I just don't know how good of a port it'd be past the "It runs!" stage. :P

 

0.1 fps is still a framerate.

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, Murdoch said:

 

0.1 fps is still a framerate.

It is. It also most assuredly wouldn't be that bad, the Virtual Boy isn't quite that underpowered.

 

Its CPU is the NEC V810, a 32-bit RISC chip running at 20 MHz. Not exactly STELLAR speed, but well, the 3D0 was a 32-bit custom ARM chip running at 12.5 MHz, and the Jaguar was a 68000 with Tom/Jerry being custom RISC chips.

 

It might need some reduction/simplification, but it should at least be serviceable. Whether it's good is another question entirely.

Edited May 18, 2022 by Dark Pulse

[BBQgiraffe]

the Virtual Boy does not have nearly enough memory to run Doom, however you could probably stuff Wolf3D in there if you really wanted to

[Dark Pulse]

5 hours ago, BBQgiraffe said:

the Virtual Boy does not have nearly enough memory to run Doom, however you could probably stuff Wolf3D in there if you really wanted to

64K of work PSRAM, 128K graphics DRAM, 128K VRAM. The latter two can essentially be accessed at the same time, the former is general purpose.

 

It'd probably need to be cut down hard like the SNES/32X versions, but I do think it could be done. Remember, the sprites would be getting reduced in resolution, four-bit grayscaling, etc. It's not going to take up nearly the same amount of memory as something trying to resemble the original game. Compression on top of that might be able to reduce it even further.

 

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/virtual-boy/

 

EDIT: It also mentions up to 16 MB of external RAM being possible to have, too, along with 16 MB of ROM.

Edited May 20, 2022 by Dark Pulse

[Metal_Slayer]

If someone really makes that Zeebo port a reality it should include the game in full Brazilian Portuguese subtitles, since all of the games there had it, Quake 2 in particular even had dubbed voices.

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, Metal_Slayer said:

If someone really makes that Zeebo port a reality it should include the game in full Brazilian Portuguese subtitles, since all of the games there had it, Quake 2 in particular even had dubbed voices.

That would probably require some changes under the good so that it can fit in accented/non-latin characters, yes.

 

Graphical lumps would be a bit trickier to replace, given that they're assuming fixed heights and so on.

[Metal_Slayer]

I gave it a little bit of thought and I remembered that Portuguese doesn't use the letters K, Y, and W, X and Z are barely used, so maybe there's a way to work around that, the only letters with graphs that are really needed are Á, É, Ç and Ã.

[Dark Pulse]

6 hours ago, Metal_Slayer said:

I gave it a little bit of thought and I remembered that Portuguese doesn't use the letters K, Y, and W, X and Z are barely used, so maybe there's a way to work around that, the only letters with graphs that are really needed are Á, É, Ç and Ã.

Abacaxi.

[Faceman2000]

8 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Abacaxi.

Taxista, xixi, executivo, exemplo, texto, explorar.

 

Luz, paz, raiz, fazer.

 

You could definitely get away without using those other letters, but a lot of common words use “z” and to a lesser extent “x”. Not impossible to work around, but not as simple as he implied.

[Gez]

On vendredi 20 mai 2022 at 8:28 AM, Dark Pulse said:

That would probably require some changes under the good so that it can fit in accented/non-latin characters, yes.

If you're restricting yourself to extended Latin characters (accents and other diacritics, ligatures) then there's not really much need for changes under the hood. Doom already uses characters identified by their ASCII code points. Specifically: STCFNxyz lumps, where xyz are the decimal number for the character's ASCII code (e.g., 'A' is STCFN065).

 

So what you need to do is to use an Extended ASCII standard like ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252 and provide the missing characters yourself. The second part is easy because the work was already done in GZDoom. The only gotcha is the weird case of STCFN121, which is a '|' instead of an 'y' for some reason no one can explain. If you're providing characters yourself, however, you can fix that on your side with a little hack.

Edited May 25, 2022 by Gez

[omx32x]

On 5/20/2022 at 3:28 AM, Dark Pulse said:

That would probably require some changes under the good so that it can fit in accented/non-latin characters, yes.

 

Graphical lumps would be a bit trickier to replace, given that they're assuming fixed heights and so on.

you could just ignore accented characters all together

 

many games from the 80s and 90s that were translated to brazilian portuguese just straight up ignored it and honestely it doesnt really make a huge difference in the end of the day

[Dark Pulse]

20 hours ago, omalefico32x said:

you could just ignore accented characters all together

 

many games from the 80s and 90s that were translated to brazilian portuguese just straight up ignored it and honestely it doesnt really make a huge difference in the end of the day

I mean yeah, if you don't care about accents, things get a lot easier as long as it is still readable in the Latin alphabet :P

[ChopBlock223]

I'm gonna second Wolfenstein 3D, it seems like it would be a lot easier and would have better performance. It's also a classic.

Not that even a SNES-like port of Doom to the Virtual Boy wouldn't be cool, however.

[elvenezolanoXD]

On 5/10/2022 at 11:31 PM, Moonie said:

I know it's a bit of a random question, but since Doom is always ported to anything it came to my mind which console does not yet have a port of Doom, after seeing the Street Fighter 2 port for Virtual Boy (https://youtu.be/nUChl88zcZE) I was wondering if the console would have enough power to run Doom, there's even a Super Mario Kart homebrew for the Virtual Boy that runs at a much better frame-rate than the SNES, on Zeebo it was after seeing OpenLara running on it (

 

- https://www.tripleoxygen.net/wiki/console/zeebo/ambiente_de_desenvolvimento
- https://zeebowiki.blogspot.com/2019/02/instalacao-e-configuracao-do-ambiente.html
- https://www.tripleoxygen.net/files/devices/zeebo/doc/

 

I know, both are failed consoles that few people own and even fewer would be able to play these ports, but man... it would be so awesome to see Doom running on these two consoles, I was wondering if there is any project or interest in this and if i can help in any way.

la verdad de lo poco que se es que zeebo tenia quake 1y 2 y otros juegos pero de doom, no creo

[Moonie]

Gosh... I really wish someone would port Doom to Zeebo just for fun, some friends of mine would love that and there's a small Facebook community called ZeeboClub where some fanatical collectors still talk and talk about Zeebo.

 

It runs on BREW 4.0.2 and supports Open GL ES 1.0 (not 1.1 unfortunately, this was a problem in the OpenLara/Tomb Raider 1 port and resulted in it only running via software that has a very low speed), such as the SDKs of them are easily available on the internet I don't know how easy that would be.

 

But well, it has 128MB of RAM and can run the PC versions of Quake 1 and 2 just fine, so I don't think Doom would have a problem running it.

I don't understand anything about programming and I don't know if I can help much, but if anyone is interested in trying to port to the platform, please contact me (email: moon.sarito@gmail.com or Telegram @MoonSarito)

[Gez]

Doesn't BREW natively feature a Java VM? You could try using Mocha Doom, which is a Java port of Doom.

[Moonie]

On 8/30/2022 at 4:53 PM, Gez said:

Doesn't BREW natively feature a Java VM? You could try using Mocha Doom, which is a Java port of Doom.

Unfortunately no, BREW is something closer to Android than JAVA.

 

Although games made for BREW cell phones are extremely simple (and Zeebo is able to run most of them because they use the same OS), but games made specifically for Zeebo hardware manage to have very impressive results compared to BREW games for mobile.

 

For example, this is a common BREW game for mobile phones (zeebo is able to run it, but you can see how limited the game is):

 

 

 

And this is a BREW game made for the Zeebo hardware in mind:

 

 

 

 

 

There's even a port of Need for Speed Carbon: Own The City straight from PSP to Zeebo's Brew, I really doubt that the BREW cell phones of the time could run something of this quality :

 

 

 

 

This is one of the reasons I asked if there is any port or anyone interested in doing a port to Zeebo specifically and not BREW, but a port to BREW would also be pretty cool since Zeebo could run it anyway.