Has anyone ever ported the early 32X prototype maps to PC?

[Wadmodder Shalton]

We understand the rushed development of the Sega 32X port of Doom which only featured 17 of the 24 levels from the Atari Jaguar version, and the fact that the music is awful. However, early in development the port was completely different. In 2008, a whopping sixteen prototypes of this game were released by drx, straight from Sega's QA archive.

 

These prototypes contained differences in a few ways, ranging with differences from music to graphics, but the maps from the early prototype is where it gets interesting.

 

The early 32X builds featured a near-Doom version 1.2 iteration of the maps with differences in texture usage and introducing a different raised bridge for E1M3's secret exit. Later 32X builds used the Jaguar map set.

 

I wonder if anyone had the intention of porting the 32X prototype maps to PC but never had the audacity to do so in the past. Needless to say, I wish to see someone port them to PC so that we don't have to play the unstable early 32X prototypes.

[Roebloz]

I dont think the 32X WAD tool works with the early prototypes unfortunately. Also, you are slightly wrong: Since they were being developed at the same time, Doom 32x doesn't use the Jaguar set, but rather an early version of it (Which includes slight differences like the lack of a BFG in E2M3) I'd be much more interested of having the September 14th version of the maps as they are an even earlier version of that Jaguar mapset.

[realjohnmadden]

On 2/11/2024 at 11:56 PM, Wadmodder Shalton said:

I wonder if anyone had the intention of porting the 32X prototype maps to PC but never had the audacity to do so in the past. Needless to say, I wish to see someone port them to PC so that we don't have to play the unstable early 32X prototypes.

Well, I can try.

I'll cook up a WAD containing the maps from the September 6th and 9th maps in a minute - I got them easily extracted, but the actual problem is the maps themselves. They use an odd format of big endian 32-bit for vertexes. However, only verts use this format, everything else uses standard PC format. I wrote a converter for PSX-to-PC once, and this should be no different.

[realjohnmadden]

That was easy enough.

32XPROTO.zip

I converted the September 6th maps to PC format and rebuilt the nodes (I was having trouble converting them from 32x to PC, probably for the better anyways). Should work with basically every port with support for Doom 1, but I haven't tested.

Note that the September 9th build is bit-for-bit identical to the Sep 6th build in terms of the IWAD.

Screenshots of 'em in Woof:

Spoiler

While I'm at it, here's the program I used to convert them. Includes project source for use in Game Maker 8.2 and the built version in the build directory.

32xconv.gm82.7z