Burger Becky is a goddamn hero. An entire team of people would have done worse work. Thank you for pointing out that she did the best she could under completely absurd circumstances.
I know Becky IRL and I remember when she told me about the 3DO Doom story, my jaw just dropped at the sheer levels of incompetence that game industry management can sink to. Maybe I should ask her if she wants to play it together on my 3DO the next time I see her. XD
Ghost81 Nah, I love my jaguar, I am working on finishing my collection. Atari Karts, Doom, Wolfenstien, Rayman, Battlesphere, Tempest 2000, Raiden, Hoverstrike, Attack of the Mutant Penguins (debatable, but I like it), Breakout, Defender, Missile Command 3D, Cannon Fodder, Flashback, Super Burnout, Worms, power Drive Rally are all fun. Plus, the homebrew scene on it is intense.
@@joeywalker2061 I actually don't like AvP that much. It's one of those games that at the time it was amazing, but it's hard to play now (at least for me). It's the same with Iron Soldier 1&2, great at the time and pushed gaming forward, but it's meh today. I don't think the controller is that bad. Don't get me wrong, it's not a good controller, but it's more than usable. It doesn't hurt to use, it fits comfortably in one's hands (I also have small baby hands). The pro controller also fixed most of the issues that the base on had. Like Atari Karts is fun with the pro but not the base imo.
My pride of my collection is a signed copy of the SNES version. I met John Romero when he visited my college and he got a kick out of me having the copy for the SNES.
Commander Rex328 He just started laughing because most people have him sign like PC/DOS versions. He also told me about how ID had barely any involvement in the port and only were fully made aware of it when it was like ready to ship.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing Doom on GBA in bed pretty recently. It's honestly quite enjoyable despite all the technical issues and it just feels great playing Doom on a Gameboy.
It look even more impressive on a Gameboy Micro. That and Duke Nukem Advance. We are at a point where cellphones can put out PS3/XB360 quality graphics but I'm still more impressed by running Doom on a GB Micro.
Well, given you can easily play it on a Vita or a PSP (and basically every single device in the known universe with a screen) there's no reason to play it on the Game Boy except curiosity. I used the files from Doom 1 and 2 I bought from Steam and put them on my Vita. It's amazing.
txcforever Hence why it's embarrassing. I have that excellent Beloko Android "multi-port" from the Amazon app store and an attachable gamepad so I have no excuse. But there's just something charming and accessible about playing it on GBA. Kinda wish I had a Vita though...
Not too embarrassing. The GBA version is decent port that runs better than a lot of the other console versions and still plays well. Obviously there are more modern ways of playing Doom, but its not a bad choice if you happen to have a GBA with you anyway.
The interesting thing about the Saturn version is that the game was apparently up and running at a near flawless 60 fps, but at the cost of a lot of texture warping. Which Carmack infamously despised. If Carmack hadn't been so stubborn, the Saturn version would have been the best running console port of the game, by far.
Dark Mountain Productions for all we know the warping could have been extremely distracting. If it's just ps1-type stuff going on it would've been fine, and it likely was just that, but have you _seen_ what affine swim looks like at its worst? I'm not saying that the Saturn version is excusable but we don't really know the whole story
Dark Mountain Productions The texture warping was probably caused by the fact that both the Saturn and PlayStation lacked perspective-correct hardware texture transforms. Carmack should've sucked it up. I'm glad he admitted his mistake on being nitpicky on the textures.
BesuBaru: BesuBaru: Not really doable. The original texture-warping engine and the final software-render engine were programmed completly differently. They didn't even use the same parts of the Saturn's hardware. The original engine put the blunt of the graphics work on the Saturn's VDPs leaving the CPU with ample rooms to run the rest of the game. The final version, to meet Carmack's demands, had to force the CPU to do more-or-less everything and leave the Saturn's dedicated graphics-hardware basically unused. This is why the game runs like sludge.
The Jag levels being reused on other ports for "memory" reasons was about RAM, not storage space. Less variety in the textures & enemies was key to getting the PS1 version working as well as it did.
For anyone wanting to try, the 3DO version emulated is one of the best versions at the time. It's either the emulator FreeDO or 3DOPlay or the like but it allows you to overclock the virtual CPU easily in real time, and the game runs about as good as the Jaguar in full screen. Only downside is the emulator has basically piss-all for controlls support but use something like XPadder and it works beautifully!
My first DOOM experience was at a baby sitters house who had, get this, a stand up Jaguar arcade cabinet with DOOM on it. The lack of music made it almost unbearably scary to me as a kid, so when Doom 3 came out I didnt understand what everyone's fuss was about it being a horror game. DOOM on jaguar was a horror game to me.
I just finished watching your "Doom Console Ports #1" video that's been uploaded since 2 years ago this morning. I was hoping for another video of the same topic to come out from your channel then lo and behold here it is now uploaded 6 hours ago. Thanks for making another one of these!
I love this stuff. You should check out the demoscene. I was reading that Mario's face in Mario 64 was a demo the dev was working on to test the hardware and Miyamoto decided to put it in the game
I'm surprised that you have only 150k+ subscribers. You're always very descriptive and thorough with your videos. I'm glad to be a subscriber. Your videos are always good man. Also, 1.3k likes VS 13 Dislikes, is quite a good ratio. Keep this shit going dude. I'm a solid fan.
Back for that sweet Soberdwarf editing. ;) That is an incredible story about the 3DO port. I can’t believe someone could think that game development is that simple. Another great video, Skelly Crew!
Soooo happy to see a Part 2 to this series! I just got back from a trip to Italy and found the GBA copy of Doom. Any time I mention this to people, I point them to the video that introduced me to it
Thanks for another excellent episode of Punching Weight. You've got to love some of these Doom ports purely for how they came about in the first place, it's always interesting hearing how they came to be. I've always had a soft spot for Doom on the Atari Jaguar and even the GBA version.
Incredibly insightful; thanks Derek! I only ever played the PC and PS1 versions previously, and I spent sooo much time with PS1 link cable co-op. I had no idea there were such huge differences between the quality and content of the other ports.
The level changes in Jaguar DOOM weren't just to reduce the size of the levels on the ROM - they also reduced the memory footprint of the game. Remember, PC DOOM required a minimum 4 MiB of RAM. In the fifth console generation, 2 or even 1 MiB of RAM was the norm; only the N64 and the Saturn had 4 MiB of RAM. Every level in DOOM has four main structures that must be loaded into memory before the game can run: the list of linedefs that make up the level, the BSP tree used for rendering the world, the blockmap used for collision detection, and the table used to reject impossible line-of-sight checks. The more complex the level, the more memory required just to load it. Textures also take up a significant chunk of the engine's memory usage. A texture has to be in memory for the engine to use the moment it's needed; if the renderer realizes it's missing a texture, it has to request that texture be loaded from the WAD (or the ROM, in this case). Not a problem if it only occasionally needs to load a new texture, but on a console with more constrained memory, there's a risk that the engine might need more textures to render a single scene than it can keep in memory at any one time. If this happened, the engine would "thrash," unloading and reloading the same textures multiple times on every frame, which would murder the framerate. To prevent this problem, textures were swapped around to keep the number of textures that could appear on one screen to a minimum. The game also uses large memory structures called "visplanes" to render floors and ceilings. The extremely simplified explanation is that every floor and ceiling visible in a scene requires at least one visplane to render. Visplanes are manipulated in performance-critical code, so they cannot be allocated dynamically as needed. The PC version of DOOM allocates exactly 128 visplanes at startup, and not a single one more. If it ever ran out, the game would simply exit to DOS. (This is impossible in official levels, but it became a frequent source of frustration for early modders.) Reducing the number of separate floors and ceilings allowed John Carmack to cut the number of visplanes down to 64. To summarize: The simplified levels reduced the size of the data structures needed by the DOOM engine, reduced the number of textures that needed to be loaded at a single time, and reduced the number of visplanes needed to render floors and ceilings. Because John Carmack had already solved these problems, most of the console ports were based on that version.
Re comments @ 2:22 : Enemies in 32X Doom can only display front-side sprites, but they can face different directions, and it's technically possible to sneak up on them. But beside not being able to see which way they're facing, there aren't a lot of places to actually approach an enemy from behind its field of view, which is forward-facing but very wide. Also, while in Wait mode they can hear nearby-player weapons, so best keep quiet if you really want to get behind them undetected. ;)
Great video! The Jaguar ports for Doom and Wolfenstein 3D are fantastic. I mean, yeah, there's no music on Doom but it plays pretty well. The 3DO Doom port, well, not so much lol. They made up for it with Wolfenstein though. By the way, how did you capture the Jaguar footage. There's some dithering going on in your capture that isn't in the actually there. Not that that takes away from this video. Loved the script, narration, and editing as usual. Great stuff!
Its sad Carmack didn't know how to fully take advantage of the Jaguar CPU SIMD and multithreading back in 1994 when he made the Jaguar version. The Jaguar CPU was so ahead of its time developers didn't know how to fully utilize it. Infact it was so powerful AMD took the Jaguar CPU architecture and made a faster multicore version of it for its APU lineup for desktop, laptops and tablets in 2011. They even used an octocore version of the Jaguar architecture in 2013 for the current gen consoles. Even the mighty Xbox One X with its 6TFLOP gpu uses a modified version of the Jaguar cpu with faster clocks (2.3ghz), larger instruction TLBs and data TLBs, and an improved memory management unit (MMU) for faster main memory access, and an improved GPU command processor that reduces CPU cycles needed to issue DX12 drawcalls.
@@2drealms196 The Jaguar was perhaps a little too ahead of its time. Much like the Saturn and, to an extent, the N64, the Jaguar was very difficult to develop for.
Great episode, hearing about DOOM never gets old. While the 3DO port is probably objectively the worst, the Saturn version is by far the most disappointing to me. After seeing PowerSlave, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D running well on the system (not to mention some other decent efforts, like Alien Trilogy), seeing DOOM run as poorly as it does was like a kick in the nuts. Fun fact about the Euro version, if you play it on a US system, it runs about 10 to 15% faster due to the 50 to 60hz change, so I suppose that's probably the ideal way to play it if you really feel the need to put yourself through it. I'd like to track down a link cable myself and see how bad the system link play is in the import versions.
@@ikagura If you think the Saturn couldn't handle Doom. Especially since Duke 3d and quake had better ports. You underestimate the power of the Saturn.
Seeing a new SSFF video popping up in my sub box...is always a fantastic thing to see! Been watching since the original Lophat Jello days aka RWtv days, so 2011 or so and have YET to be disappointed by any of your content. And once again, another great video! Thanks for the awesome work and keep it comin' man! You've gained a good amount of subs over the last year or so and the view counts have been improving more and more. Just gotta manage to squeeze out more quality content so they'll grow even more!
Very nice video as usual! I´m a huge Seg Saturn fan even it used to suck hard sometimes but I would like to see more of the system struggling to run 3d games!
Personally, my favourite port of Doom 1 and Doom 2 was the versions that came with doom 3 bfg edition on PC, XBOX 360 and PS3, I had the ps3 version of doom 3 bfg edition. Doom 1 and Doom 2 had all the content there, more buttons than controls could be mapped to (both R triggers were the fire function for example) the draw distance was excellent on enemies, who remained almost in full detail at even the largest distances, and could easily be seen. Perfect frame rate, the graphics were possibly the best I have seen the original 2 games look (without modding) and the music was still midi files, but at the highest possible sound quality. Doom had 4 episodes, and Doom 2 had an additional short campaign, to go with it's already lengthy campaign, online mutliplayer and local multiplayer support, co-op, death match. You could also save at any point in the level and load from it, instead of starting the level from the beginning with nothing but your fists and a pistol, but I don't think you could save in co-op mode though. Also you get a remaster of doom 3, with 2 extra campaigns, online multiplayer, and the fact that you can now use your flashlight while using your weapons (flashlight is no longer in inventory, you press a button and you have light, until it runs out and has to recharge) which helps with the game being dark as fuck. Was definitely worth the money, and I will probably get doom 3 bfg edition again for PC.
Jaguar Doom is what made me fall in love with Doom. I was used to playing it w/o music and it took me forever to figure out that the creepy high pitched sound was doors closing.
The story of the 3DO version is fascinating to me. For some reason I love stories of catastrophic overambition and incompetence, maybe because Ive been the one with those in some points in my life. Its nice to know it happens to others too.
Jaguar Doom wasn't trimmed down due to storage concerns, rather just due to not enough RAM and performance issues. Also, Saturn Doom doesn't feature any code from the 32x version, one of the devs said in a Q&A (in a comments section lol) that PS1 Doom code is all they were given.
I was going to be like 'but Saturn DOOM is really pretty fun?' and then I realised when you brought it up that PAL and JP (I played the JP one recently) are more refined and tweaked. Goes beyond just the link cable set up - it actually plays pretty well and the password system even saved your weapons/ammo.
This played automatically after SegaLordx’s recent Doom’s SegaCD mod update video in Nov. 2024, six years later. The consistency and quality of you craft Derek, makes watching this so many years later so seamless and comforting.
3:06 The levels were redesigned to be more efficient, which made them the obvious candidates for use on more resource constrained systems. Having the raw storage space isn't a huge benefit in this instance. You have to fit the entire map into memory, unless you're willing/able to load chunks into memory on the fly, and then the geometry/textures have to be simple enough to render quickly.
I feel like Rebecca Heineman story you talk about is something that happens all over the video game and creative industries. A lot of silent suffering and people willing to accept unfair circumstances financially because they can’t handle the business side of things. Not trying to downplay Burger Becky, I somehow became friends with her on fb when I was trying to learn snes assembly language. She’s a legend! How come the Jaguar video has kinda like, a halftone pattern over it
I don't know if I've ever suggested this to you before, but I would totally love to see at least one episode of Punching weight dedicated to Doom WADs. It's a bit outside the norm, but honestly, I adore the way people have stretched Doom far past it's breaking point for the last 2 decades so much and would love to hear of some WADs that have stuck out to you personally for being ambitious or just weird. It's one of the reasons why, whenever anyone asks recommendations for cheap games, I always say that Doom and Doom 2 are the most value you'll ever get for under 10€.
We have co-op doom! In the form of many engines. The most common being Zandronum. However, Doomseeker is used FOR multiplayer. Once the server is chosen, it opens Zandronum along with the server its trying to get into
Doom Legacy too, it's a rather old port that I find that preserves really well the original software graphics (specially colors) and the controls feel like the original too. That being said, I still think the most loyal port ever is Doom95, but I don't have a clue if it runs in modern systems.
Hey, I have two Jaguars, Two Controllers (well five, one rotary dial, two normal, and two pro controllers), two catboxes, and... one copy of Doom... guess I could get a second, but the Jaguar is getting expensive to collect for.
Whaaaaat? Just since a couple of days I started to play doom again (with some incredible mods, like Simon‘s Destiny or the Hocus Pocus mod, which you should actually check out, too) and here you are uploading part 2 of Doom Ports!
Saturn Doom remains the only game I've ever taken back to the shop because it was crap! As soon as I exchanged my copy (I said my brother had bought one too), the very next guy brought his copy back too! The guy behind the counter shot me a look and said "I guess it's rubbish then" and I said "yeah, but I've got rid of my copy now!" On a related note, I actually loved the SNES version back in the day! I'd learned to play Doom in school as someone had installed it on the school's PC (we only had one) and I relished the chance to play it at home, but a PC was way out of our price range. My only fault with SNES Doom at the time was a lack of save games or passwords, but this just meant that I got to know the early levels very, very well!
Recently I was gonna get the GBA port but I found out about DS Doom, a homebrew you can run on a linker. Yes, it's basically Doom on the NDS, with the upper screen showing the action and the bottom screen showing the map and HUD. It's based on the freeware version of Doom so it only includes the first chapter, and it's got a few issues, such as the fact that you can't remap the buttons, but it runs great and is really just a joy to play. Highly recommended. Make sure you get the latest version, though, 1.4 or something, as the earlier ones have bigger issues such as the absence of music.
As a kid playing it every night at Tower Records/Tower Video, I loved that the Jaguar port had no music- it was infinitely more creepy and empty, adding to the tension and making me want to take things slowly. I felt like sneaking up on everything.
This was so cool! I just went looking for a side by side comparison of the Doom ports after some nostalgia for the SNES version. What I found was so much better! BRB looking for the 3DO soundtrack hahaha
Another fascinating look at Doom's history :) For anyone interested in hearing Rebecca Heineman's full account of the shit she had to deal with to get the 3DO port done in time, it's on her channel, here. ua-cam.com/video/rBbIil2HPSU/v-deo.html
The problem about simplified level design wasn't storage but available memory. If you look up the Doom 32x 090694 prototype (Which still has the PC textures and levels), you'll notice firsthand how unstable the framerate was and that will make you glad they made those compromises. Doom on the snes didn't have that problem despite having the PC levels because it was technically a 3d-accelerated port via Super FX 2.
Back in 2009-2011 my Middle School years were spent listening to the Doom 3do soundtrack along with other stellar vgm soundtracks. Unfortunately never really got to play doom back then, my first true doom experience outside of that one scene of doom in Charlie Brown & Chocolate The Factory, was playing the GBA port on an emulator..........Left a foul taste for some time but, after playing how it was meant to be played on PC I can see that it is a very impressive game worthy of its acclaimed status.
Another good doom game to cover is impressive Doom 2 ports: Doom 2 GBA is far more impressive than Doom GBA: it has all the original weapons, monsters, and levels without any cuts. Doom 2 was also on the tapwave zodiac, and the game speed is increased.
GBA Doom II has a customized engine that changed some minor aspects of game play. Also, two of the larger original PC levels had to be split into individual halves, and some others had to have chunks cut out, or barriers added to reduce object and texture loads. Still, it's a great and clever GBA port. Zodiac Doom II is a more accurate port overall, but the controls were pretty bad.
Classic DOOM Interesting, I guess there were technically some level design cuts. Still, you're getting the complete Doom 2 package with the GBA version. Too bad it's so expensive...
I know you made a video on Doom 64 before as the HVGN but I want to comment on how awesome Doom 64 is. Im playing through it on cartridge right now after playing through it using Doom 64 EX and it just amazing. As a seasoned classic Doomer the level design is on par with the Plutonia Experiment and has amazing control and frame rate. Goldeneye and Turok are great an all but Doom 64 is just so smooth and refined. I wish it was successful back in the day so that the sequel that was planned would have been made. The sequel would have re-added the revenant, chaingunner, archvile, and spidermastermind that was missing in Doom 64. The sequel would have used a larger cartridge size. The Doom 64 engine is so robust and smooth for n64 that I bet a full 2-player coop mode and 4 player deathmatch would have possible on one system. With the expansion pack I bet four player coop would have been possible. Sadly Doom 64 was missmarketed (it should have been called Doom: Absolution or Doom 64: The Absolution) and people were moving away from 2.5 to full 3d Quake-like even at the cost of frame rate and gameplay. I love the n64 and it's library but I will agree that often times the n64's anti-aliasing was detrimental. In Doom 64 it just works so well.
In a future Doom Punching Weight, talk about the odd GBA port of Doom II. Why? It, unlike its predecessor, doesn't use the Doom engine. It uses some other GBA FPS engine.
3:27 "Yeah I said it! GBA version! Fight me!" *Looks at Derek... raises fists up... then stands next to him, ready to fight the crowd* Derek, we got this... Let's go...
As probably one of the only people who actually played 3do Doom when it was new (alongside 3d0 Gex which I will argue is the best game on the system), I did not notice how bad it was. I was just excited to be playing Doom, this great game that my 2nd grade class was talking about. Nostalgia goggles are amazing things. Wish my uncle still had that 3do. But, oh well.
I'm surprised there was no mention of how on the 3DO version Doom guy's head exploded when he died at the bottom. That wasn't something that happened on any other port was it?
That poor woman. Do you have any plans to elaborate or flesh out her full story, all games and such? It may even garner you a good interview at some point. I will say, the SNES version was poor, but dammit, I loved it and Wolfenstein 3D. (mainly because my dad wouldn't let me play on our PC...but it was ok for him to...lol). I wanted to say thank you for continuing what you do. You were one of the inspirations for my failed attempt at reviewing a game, so I am looking at donating on patreon, with the hope that one day a few of the obscure games I enjoyed growing up could get at least a bit of play on your stream. Keep up the good work, both of you.
Her own account of the whole development process is here, on her channel, and what a disaster it was. What an incredibly skilled programme she is, I'm honestly amazed at how she got it to work at all. ua-cam.com/video/rBbIil2HPSU/v-deo.html
A little interesting fact about Bill Heineman AKA Burger Becky. In November of 2003, Heineman was diagnosed with gender identity disorder and began the transition from Bill Heineman into Rebecca Ann Heineman, a transgender woman. Now kown as Burger Becky.
Good video. Nice upbeat attitude. Doom is a great game to have on many systems and it is wise to avoid slagging the ports off for graphics quality reasons. Now why is that? Well, it is worth remembering that it was on the PC (pretty much entirely, and I won't go into say the Mac etc) at first and it changed the system requirements people wanted for a PC that might play games. It also drastically eroded other computer expectations like the Mac or Amiga and atari (e.g. Falcon or ST) and so on. So basically that meant if a person could get *ANY* PC (even borrowed) to play the game, they would do. It was a bit like that for wolfenstein3D too. So for example you might get a bunch of friends hunched around somebody's sibling's PC playing Doom with all the settings turned down on a 386, or maybe, if you were lucky, a low end 486. Playing the game on a crappy console system, while not always optimal was still at least something fun while you invested your hopes for the console mainly in other games. It is easy to take easy pot shots at some crappy console graphics, but it is worth respecting that the tolerance for those graphics means that the game has since been shoehorned into systems (even the amiga and genesis/megadrive) in ways that should not seem possible, and that is largely thanks to the patience people have by not slagging it all off or being too negative. Not only that but the ways in which it then gets coded again for various system optimisations is great. For example "ami Doom" (doom for the amiga) can have massive emphasis on an FPU even though it might be on an upgraded Amiga A500. And then you might get a version for an FPU which is incapable of transcendental operations. When you consider the c64 has doom and yet the A500 ws often the logical upgrade step for such commodore users, it is heartwarming to see optimisations followed by more custom FPU optimisations and then more upon that. As an aside, a link cable console version such as the Saturn version, if coded nowadyasould actually run faster if you use distributed computing OO coding (and some bare metal coding) to share the processing power. It would run faster on two linked machines than on one machine. It would be as if the master machine gets the coding power of both machines ti run just its own game. Then you can send something like a video stream from the master machine to the slave. The reason why that would work is because most of the world generation could be done (live in realtime) as pre-calc, and the display drawn to the screen is really just leftover processing power. The "left over processing power" for display is the only thing coded twice, and it would be barely anything in terms of processor power compared to the old version. Think about it for a while and it makes sense.
I have a very special story to tell, special to me anyways haha. Doom on the jaguar was the first time I had ever played doom. I was one of those weird and rare kids who not only wanted a jaguar but also had the means. The means being a grandmother who loved me very much. The premise was that I earned an allowance and that if I wanted X item, I would have to pay back the loan with allowance to afford it. well you can imagine that didnt go always as planned...sometimes grandmother would abuse the terms and over spend. shes still alive and I love her dearly. she is a mother to me when I needed one the most. I was always taught to sell off a system if i wanted to afford a new one and thus it went, I had a jaguar on launch day and the jaguar cd on its launch day and between those two consoles I played doom for the first time and myst for the first time and both went on to become top franchises of my life. played them all and read all the books to both franchises. they mean alot to me doom especially, also resident evil as many can agree
I love 3DO Doom's soundtrack. Yeha tahst right fight me. I love the original as well but 3DO is a unique separate style of the music. Becky herself is also a hero to make something like this within WEEKS. She really is a legendary part of Doom history. We salute you.
The Jaguar's levels were used for the PS1 and GBA versions not because of the space limitations you're thinking of, but because of a different kind of space limit. I'm referring to Memory, or RAM if you prefer. The PS1 only had 2MB of System Memory and 1MB of Video Memory. PC Doom claims to require 4MB of RAM and highly recommends 8MB (though you can actually get it to boot with less). The Jaguar levels were already redesigned for a low memory enviroment since the Jag only had 2MB itself, so the levels would run much more smoothly on the PS1. You may notice that the Doom 2 levels on Custom Playstation Edition run pretty terribly and at least one of them is prone to crashing right at level load. The Jag levels don't have that issue
The primary limiting factor that would make the fully textured PC levels impractical on PlayStation isn't storage space but rather texture memory - the PSX version runs extremely tight on available RAM as it is. There are very strict limits imposed on the amount of textures and sprites that can be used per level.
Didn't the Jaguar version of Doom have simplified level geometry to reduce the load on the CPU? Because id Tech 1 is *very* CPU-heavy while consoles at the time had very slow CPUs.
The main reason the maps were simplified was because of memory constraints. The DOS version required 4MBs of RAM, the Jaguar has 2MB. So the so called "engine limits" are lower and they kept butchering the maps until they didn't crash!
Yeah that's a deal breaker when the Atari Jaguar version of Doom does not have music it is a total flop for me but I also heard they got a port Homebrew of Doom for with music on the Jaguar now I'd like to hear it
Some really strange decisions huh. Indeed, why port Jaguar doom onto hardware that could clearly handle the original game's levels just fine? And storage space certainly would be a factor in some minor cases. How large IS doom anyway? Wouldn't surprise me if the crazy person that created the SNES doom only limited the sprites because of storage space constraints... Then again, who can say... Probably one of the most difficult versions to analyse technically, given it likely being entirely written in assembly. And not just any assembly, but the exceedingly obscure SuperFX assembly at that. XD
Actually, talking about SNES doom again gets me wondering about NTSC vs PAL... I assume there's no meaningful difference because the code wasn't changed to benefit from it... But assuming the code is DMA limited rather than SuperFX limited, the PAL version has roughly double the amount of DMA time per frame. That's always a major concern for anything on the SNES that is being rendered by an external chip - Starfox is hard capped at 20 FPS regardless of what the SuperFX can manage, simply because if you consider that it appears to render at roughly 224x192 in 16 colours... (well, 4 bits per pixel. Given 8/16 background palettes that's up to 121/241 colours, but it's difficult to combine 3d graphics rendering in realtime with palette switches that have to be on tile boundaries.)... The reduced resolution is already used to gain more DMA time. 224x192x4 bits = 21,504 bytes. That's how much data you have to push to draw a frame. On an NTSC machine, you have 262 lines, and with forced blanking you can use any line on which you aren't drawing anything to do DMA - 178 bytes per line, 70 lines = 12,460 bytes per frame. So, with careful thought You could get that to 2 frames per screen update, which would be 30 fps, but I suppose they couldn't manage it for some reason. (maybe I'm optimistic about the horizontal resolution they used) - they did get starfox 2 pushed up to a 30 FPS cap though. Even so, on a PAL system, with the same rendering resolution you'd have 312 lines per frame, which would mean 120 blank lines. 180 bytes per line (minor advantage of PAL machine compared to just having more blanking lines), = 21600 bytes per frame. This means if you were to optimise the code properly, the PAL version could in principle run without a framerate cap; EG instead of a 30 fps theoretical (or 20 fps actual) cap, it'd be able to hit the actual 50fps limit of a PAL system. (presuming the SuperFX can keep up, which it probably can't, but then at least you know what's limiting you.), or, barring that you could definitely hit a 25 fps cap without any doubt at all. Still, doom isn't Starfox, and I have no idea what's most limiting it's performance. And again, I suspect little to no PAL specific optimisation was done; That in and of itself would suggest a PAL system is spending a decent chunk of each frame completely idle, since it has neither game code, nor DMA to perform... Ah well. XD
It's actually not that strange. The biggest reason would've been the limited storage space, both on an actual cartridge as well as in VRAM - all those textures need storage space and memory, and remember, the original Doom required 4 MB of RAM on a PC in 1993. Even that was considered threadbare - id recommended 8 MB of RAM. Needless to say, no console of the time had 8 MB of memory - so that means less textures, and at that point, you're no longer running the original game's levels since you're compromising on texture choices. The first one that could actually plausibly run the original Doom unfettered would've been the N64 for that reason (though that's a fairly recent development), and the first one that actually got made and was widespread was the Dreamcast due to its 16 MB of RAM, and that ran it rather well. Also, some maps got highly complex - if it's too complex in terms of geometry in view, you'd overload and crash the renderer. This is why the new maps are very blocky, and much of the original maps had simplifications to make them chunkier.
The Playstation could've handled most of the original Doom levels, but development laziness and cost meant it got saddled with the gimped Jaguar assets.
Did you read my other comment where I said hackers have the PS1 port cracked open to the point of running custom maps on it, and that we have found that no, it definitely CANNOT handle most of the original Doom levels unaltered? In the PS1 version, for example, VRAM limits force you to a limit of 16 flats. All floors, all ceilings - you can pick sixteen textures to do them all. There's many Doom maps in the PC version which use more than those. The second you change this, you might have the original geometry still, but no way are using the original maps anymore. Sidedef textures also have limits, though it's a bit more flexible. In PS1 Doom, textures are one of four sizes: 16x128, 64x128, 128x128, or (skies only) 256x128. You have enough room to fit 6 256x128 textures, 12 128x128 textures, 32 64x128 textures, or 192 16x128 textures in the VRAM. Obviously, maps will need a combination of different sizes. Here's one example of a map I'm porting to the PS1 game (TNT Evilution MAP05: Hanger if you're curious), and as you'll see, I've filled up all of my flat and texture spaces: cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/439707595494653962/463090269441490954/unknown.png I literally do not have room for any more textures. I have thus become forced to compromise on that. Then, even when I had that sorted out, due to the PS1's limited RAM, the map failed to allocate - the geometry was so complex that it'd just plain run out of RAM. I had to cut three entire (and mostly disused) monster types from the map before it would finally load. Lastly, due to weirdnesses with the renderer, I've had to alter some rooms slightly in order to make the game run faster, not crash due to too many vertices being in view, or to work around texture-mapping bugs (the PS1 game apparently will flip a texture entirely if you give it a negative Y offset). Trust me when I say this: Simplifcations were needed, for a lot of reasons.
![Doom Console Ports #3 (Switch/Xbox/iOS) | Punching Weight [SSFF]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/BA8fZkIj4No/mqdefault.jpg)
![Doom Console Ports #3 (Switch/Xbox/iOS) | Punching Weight [SSFF]](/img/tr.png)
![Duke Nukem 3D N64 vs PS1 vs Saturn | Punching Weight [SSFF]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1Zv0YC5nkmA/mqdefault.jpg)
Burger Becky is a goddamn hero. An entire team of people would have done worse work. Thank you for pointing out that she did the best she could under completely absurd circumstances.
Betcha she could have saved Cyberpunk 2077s development woes XD
I had never heard this story before. What a badass she seems to be!
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Now I get why the port is so bad. It was programmed by a woman
@@getgle Someone didn't watch the video
I'm a 3DO kid, and it makes me so sad that the 3DO version of Doom is so bad when Wolf 3D is amazing.
Least we got cool covers out of it.
Optimus is doing fantastic work on 3do Doom. Check out.
Chalk it up to corporate incompetence.
3DO kids represent!
Who asked?
I know Becky IRL and I remember when she told me about the 3DO Doom story, my jaw just dropped at the sheer levels of incompetence that game industry management can sink to.
Maybe I should ask her if she wants to play it together on my 3DO the next time I see her. XD
Also mention to her how much of a LEGEND she is! Still can't believe she got that port ready in time.
Hell is a warm place. :) Hi Vicki!
Rebecca Heineman Hi, Becky! :D
Rebecca Heineman Yo Becky, you a legend
I still can't believe it as well, and I'm the one who did it.
Kid with a Jaguar: "I will never be bored again!"
Mom, looking like Yoda: "You will be. You _will_ be."
Ghost81
Nah, I love my jaguar, I am working on finishing my collection. Atari Karts, Doom, Wolfenstien, Rayman, Battlesphere, Tempest 2000, Raiden, Hoverstrike, Attack of the Mutant Penguins (debatable, but I like it), Breakout, Defender, Missile Command 3D, Cannon Fodder, Flashback, Super Burnout, Worms, power Drive Rally are all fun. Plus, the homebrew scene on it is intense.
@@wschippr1 Don't forget alien vs predator my cousin had a jaguar and that game was awesome.
@@wschippr1 controller sucks ass through a crazy straw through.
@@joeywalker2061
I actually don't like AvP that much. It's one of those games that at the time it was amazing, but it's hard to play now (at least for me). It's the same with Iron Soldier 1&2, great at the time and pushed gaming forward, but it's meh today.
I don't think the controller is that bad. Don't get me wrong, it's not a good controller, but it's more than usable. It doesn't hurt to use, it fits comfortably in one's hands (I also have small baby hands). The pro controller also fixed most of the issues that the base on had. Like Atari Karts is fun with the pro but not the base imo.
My pride of my collection is a signed copy of the SNES version. I met John Romero when he visited my college and he got a kick out of me having the copy for the SNES.
Very cool. :)
Zachary J Pierce lmfao
What do you mean "he got a kick out of me for having the copy of SNES."
Commander Rex328 He just started laughing because most people have him sign like PC/DOS versions. He also told me about how ID had barely any involvement in the port and only were fully made aware of it when it was like ready to ship.
@@Parody42 now that's funny.
I wonder what his reaction would be if it was the 32x port.
Wow ! That's amazing ! Lucky guy ! :)
I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing Doom on GBA in bed pretty recently. It's honestly quite enjoyable despite all the technical issues and it just feels great playing Doom on a Gameboy.
It look even more impressive on a Gameboy Micro. That and Duke Nukem Advance. We are at a point where cellphones can put out PS3/XB360 quality graphics but I'm still more impressed by running Doom on a GB Micro.
Well, given you can easily play it on a Vita or a PSP (and basically every single device in the known universe with a screen) there's no reason to play it on the Game Boy except curiosity. I used the files from Doom 1 and 2 I bought from Steam and put them on my Vita. It's amazing.
txcforever Hence why it's embarrassing. I have that excellent Beloko Android "multi-port" from the Amazon app store and an attachable gamepad so I have no excuse. But there's just something charming and accessible about playing it on GBA. Kinda wish I had a Vita though...
txcforever doom on my refridgerator when
Not too embarrassing. The GBA version is decent port that runs better than a lot of the other console versions and still plays well.
Obviously there are more modern ways of playing Doom, but its not a bad choice if you happen to have a GBA with you anyway.
The interesting thing about the Saturn version is that the game was apparently up and running at a near flawless 60 fps, but at the cost of a lot of texture warping. Which Carmack infamously despised. If Carmack hadn't been so stubborn, the Saturn version would have been the best running console port of the game, by far.
Dark Mountain Productions for all we know the warping could have been extremely distracting. If it's just ps1-type stuff going on it would've been fine, and it likely was just that, but have you _seen_ what affine swim looks like at its worst? I'm not saying that the Saturn version is excusable but we don't really know the whole story
Dark Mountain Productions you want to make an omelette you gotta break a few eggs
Dark Mountain Productions The texture warping was probably caused by the fact that both the Saturn and PlayStation lacked perspective-correct hardware texture transforms. Carmack should've sucked it up. I'm glad he admitted his mistake on being nitpicky on the textures.
bitwize it’s pretty easy to be like “my bad” years after. Hindsight is 20/20 after all.
BesuBaru: BesuBaru: Not really doable. The original texture-warping engine and the final software-render engine were programmed completly differently. They didn't even use the same parts of the Saturn's hardware. The original engine put the blunt of the graphics work on the Saturn's VDPs leaving the CPU with ample rooms to run the rest of the game. The final version, to meet Carmack's demands, had to force the CPU to do more-or-less everything and leave the Saturn's dedicated graphics-hardware basically unused. This is why the game runs like sludge.
The Jag levels being reused on other ports for "memory" reasons was about RAM, not storage space. Less variety in the textures & enemies was key to getting the PS1 version working as well as it did.
Ten minutes ago: "Dude, if you do not talk about Burger Becky, we are going to have words."
Now: "DEREK WHY DID I EVER DOUBT YOU"
John Gabriel BURGER BECKY GOT SHIT DONE
Derek's a good dude. Even if Becky had pissed him off, I don't see him having a bad word to say about her.
For anyone wanting to try, the 3DO version emulated is one of the best versions at the time. It's either the emulator FreeDO or 3DOPlay or the like but it allows you to overclock the virtual CPU easily in real time, and the game runs about as good as the Jaguar in full screen. Only downside is the emulator has basically piss-all for controlls support but use something like XPadder and it works beautifully!
Derek and Grace.... please...never stop doing what you are doing. The notification for your upload was the highlight of my morning.
morning?! its like 1pm in germany xD
YOU TUBE GLOTZ timezones
"And one other person willing to deal with your weird videogame bullshit."
Story of my life, man.
My first DOOM experience was at a baby sitters house who had, get this, a stand up Jaguar arcade cabinet with DOOM on it. The lack of music made it almost unbearably scary to me as a kid, so when Doom 3 came out I didnt understand what everyone's fuss was about it being a horror game. DOOM on jaguar was a horror game to me.
Heretic without music was a marvelous experience for full immersion. Water drops, ambient noises and the infamous sorcerer's mumblings
You should have seen PSX Doom, bro. This has got Aubrey Hodges' first foray with Doom Music, and it's just as freaky as Doom 64!
I just finished watching your "Doom Console Ports #1" video that's been uploaded since 2 years ago this morning. I was hoping for another video of the same topic to come out from your channel then lo and behold here it is now uploaded 6 hours ago. Thanks for making another one of these!
12:23 So the Saturn Doom box is basically the Fox News of game boxes 🤣? I had to.
Hey, I'm on a SSFF video! Glad to be helping you good folks keep the No Chumps Zone pumpin'!
I'm glad that you like the GBA ports Derek, Such a fun time!
Doom on three Doomed consoles,eh?
I’m not funny.
Westchester Mapper the Saturn was actually super successful in japan
In America however....
Westchester Mapper didn't really effect the console overall as much as you'd think
Westchester Mapper it actually did better than the N64 even
noato shirogane Well,I was just focusing on America.
But why would you want to stop skeletons from fighting?
IKR! If the skeletons fight, you will only have to kill one that's on low health, rather than 2 at full health.
I know, right? I'd rather encourage them to fight. ua-cam.com/video/P7KndRlL1Ak/v-deo.html
That’s Like Asking To Take Out The Cyber Demon In Doom And Not Have It At All
I love this stuff. You should check out the demoscene.
I was reading that Mario's face in Mario 64 was a demo the dev was working on to test the hardware and Miyamoto decided to put it in the game
I'm surprised that you have only 150k+ subscribers. You're always very descriptive and thorough with your videos. I'm glad to be a subscriber. Your videos are always good man. Also, 1.3k likes VS 13 Dislikes, is quite a good ratio. Keep this shit going dude. I'm a solid fan.
Back for that sweet Soberdwarf editing. ;) That is an incredible story about the 3DO port. I can’t believe someone could think that game development is that simple. Another great video, Skelly Crew!
Ultimately we're all doomed!
lol
This is a double pun. "Ultimatley" is a reference to the retail version (Ultimate Doom)
that's actually good.
ehhehhehehehheh
thats funny lol
6:06 Jaw Dropping? More like Mind Blowing, if you can say that judging by DoomGuy's face on the HUD.
Soooo happy to see a Part 2 to this series! I just got back from a trip to Italy and found the GBA copy of Doom. Any time I mention this to people, I point them to the video that introduced me to it
Thanks for another excellent episode of Punching Weight. You've got to love some of these Doom ports purely for how they came about in the first place, it's always interesting hearing how they came to be. I've always had a soft spot for Doom on the Atari Jaguar and even the GBA version.
GBA Doom is basically Jag Doom in handheld form. Very nice little port for back in the day.
Incredibly insightful; thanks Derek! I only ever played the PC and PS1 versions previously, and I spent sooo much time with PS1 link cable co-op. I had no idea there were such huge differences between the quality and content of the other ports.
I'm glad you touched up on the dev story for the 3DO version. It's such a crazy tale; definitely worth reading the full version.
The level changes in Jaguar DOOM weren't just to reduce the size of the levels on the ROM - they also reduced the memory footprint of the game. Remember, PC DOOM required a minimum 4 MiB of RAM. In the fifth console generation, 2 or even 1 MiB of RAM was the norm; only the N64 and the Saturn had 4 MiB of RAM.
Every level in DOOM has four main structures that must be loaded into memory before the game can run: the list of linedefs that make up the level, the BSP tree used for rendering the world, the blockmap used for collision detection, and the table used to reject impossible line-of-sight checks. The more complex the level, the more memory required just to load it.
Textures also take up a significant chunk of the engine's memory usage. A texture has to be in memory for the engine to use the moment it's needed; if the renderer realizes it's missing a texture, it has to request that texture be loaded from the WAD (or the ROM, in this case). Not a problem if it only occasionally needs to load a new texture, but on a console with more constrained memory, there's a risk that the engine might need more textures to render a single scene than it can keep in memory at any one time. If this happened, the engine would "thrash," unloading and reloading the same textures multiple times on every frame, which would murder the framerate. To prevent this problem, textures were swapped around to keep the number of textures that could appear on one screen to a minimum.
The game also uses large memory structures called "visplanes" to render floors and ceilings. The extremely simplified explanation is that every floor and ceiling visible in a scene requires at least one visplane to render. Visplanes are manipulated in performance-critical code, so they cannot be allocated dynamically as needed. The PC version of DOOM allocates exactly 128 visplanes at startup, and not a single one more. If it ever ran out, the game would simply exit to DOS. (This is impossible in official levels, but it became a frequent source of frustration for early modders.) Reducing the number of separate floors and ceilings allowed John Carmack to cut the number of visplanes down to 64.
To summarize: The simplified levels reduced the size of the data structures needed by the DOOM engine, reduced the number of textures that needed to be loaded at a single time, and reduced the number of visplanes needed to render floors and ceilings. Because John Carmack had already solved these problems, most of the console ports were based on that version.
I'm glad you're gonna keep talking about the crazy Doom ports. I love this topic.
Love the Jag version without the music. Its really spooky and runs great on the system. A must-own if you have the system (y)
Re comments @ 2:22 : Enemies in 32X Doom can only display front-side sprites, but they can face different directions, and it's technically possible to sneak up on them. But beside not being able to see which way they're facing, there aren't a lot of places to actually approach an enemy from behind its field of view, which is forward-facing but very wide. Also, while in Wait mode they can hear nearby-player weapons, so best keep quiet if you really want to get behind them undetected. ;)
Great video! The Jaguar ports for Doom and Wolfenstein 3D are fantastic. I mean, yeah, there's no music on Doom but it plays pretty well. The 3DO Doom port, well, not so much lol. They made up for it with Wolfenstein though. By the way, how did you capture the Jaguar footage. There's some dithering going on in your capture that isn't in the actually there. Not that that takes away from this video. Loved the script, narration, and editing as usual. Great stuff!
Its sad Carmack didn't know how to fully take advantage of the Jaguar CPU SIMD and multithreading back in 1994 when he made the Jaguar version. The Jaguar CPU was so ahead of its time developers didn't know how to fully utilize it. Infact it was so powerful AMD took the Jaguar CPU architecture and made a faster multicore version of it for its APU lineup for desktop, laptops and tablets in 2011. They even used an octocore version of the Jaguar architecture in 2013 for the current gen consoles. Even the mighty Xbox One X with its 6TFLOP gpu uses a modified version of the Jaguar cpu with faster clocks (2.3ghz), larger instruction TLBs and data TLBs, and an improved memory management unit (MMU) for faster main memory access, and an improved GPU command processor that reduces CPU cycles needed to issue DX12 drawcalls.
@@2drealms196 The Jaguar was perhaps a little too ahead of its time. Much like the Saturn and, to an extent, the N64, the Jaguar was very difficult to develop for.
8:42
Damn! That head explosion!
Great episode, hearing about DOOM never gets old. While the 3DO port is probably objectively the worst, the Saturn version is by far the most disappointing to me. After seeing PowerSlave, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D running well on the system (not to mention some other decent efforts, like Alien Trilogy), seeing DOOM run as poorly as it does was like a kick in the nuts. Fun fact about the Euro version, if you play it on a US system, it runs about 10 to 15% faster due to the 50 to 60hz change, so I suppose that's probably the ideal way to play it if you really feel the need to put yourself through it. I'd like to track down a link cable myself and see how bad the system link play is in the import versions.
mostly because Lobotomy didn't work on the Saturn version of Doom.
That and John Carmack stuck his dong in the development of it.
@@GiordanDiodatoOr that the Saturn isn't suited for 3D
@@ikagura If you think the Saturn couldn't handle Doom. Especially since Duke 3d and quake had better ports. You underestimate the power of the Saturn.
6:05 Wow I never knew there was that Doomguy's face animation on the 3DO's version of the game's HUD
i liked your intro with the skelet reaching out
Seeing a new SSFF video popping up in my sub box...is always a fantastic thing to see!
Been watching since the original Lophat Jello days aka RWtv days, so 2011 or so and have YET to be disappointed by any of your content.
And once again, another great video! Thanks for the awesome work and keep it comin' man!
You've gained a good amount of subs over the last year or so and the view counts have been improving more and more.
Just gotta manage to squeeze out more quality content so they'll grow even more!
Very nice video as usual!
I´m a huge Seg Saturn fan even it used to suck hard sometimes but I would like to see more of the system struggling to run 3d games!
Personally, my favourite port of Doom 1 and Doom 2 was the versions that came with doom 3 bfg edition on PC, XBOX 360 and PS3, I had the ps3 version of doom 3 bfg edition. Doom 1 and Doom 2 had all the content there, more buttons than controls could be mapped to (both R triggers were the fire function for example) the draw distance was excellent on enemies, who remained almost in full detail at even the largest distances, and could easily be seen. Perfect frame rate, the graphics were possibly the best I have seen the original 2 games look (without modding) and the music was still midi files, but at the highest possible sound quality. Doom had 4 episodes, and Doom 2 had an additional short campaign, to go with it's already lengthy campaign, online mutliplayer and local multiplayer support, co-op, death match. You could also save at any point in the level and load from it, instead of starting the level from the beginning with nothing but your fists and a pistol, but I don't think you could save in co-op mode though. Also you get a remaster of doom 3, with 2 extra campaigns, online multiplayer, and the fact that you can now use your flashlight while using your weapons (flashlight is no longer in inventory, you press a button and you have light, until it runs out and has to recharge) which helps with the game being dark as fuck. Was definitely worth the money, and I will probably get doom 3 bfg edition again for PC.
Now we should take the 3DO soundtrack and the Jaguar version of the game and then combine the two into a Jaguar CD game.
or make it for the Saturn
:) :) :) :)
Or maybe have the 3DO soundtrack on modern ports? Eh, that may be a licensing nightmare.
Jaguar Doom is what made me fall in love with Doom. I was used to playing it w/o music and it took me forever to figure out that the creepy high pitched sound was doors closing.
The story of the 3DO version is fascinating to me. For some reason I love stories of catastrophic overambition and incompetence, maybe because Ive been the one with those in some points in my life. Its nice to know it happens to others too.
Jaguar Doom wasn't trimmed down due to storage concerns, rather just due to not enough RAM and performance issues.
Also, Saturn Doom doesn't feature any code from the 32x version, one of the devs said in a Q&A (in a comments section lol) that PS1 Doom code is all they were given.
I was going to be like 'but Saturn DOOM is really pretty fun?' and then I realised when you brought it up that PAL and JP (I played the JP one recently) are more refined and tweaked. Goes beyond just the link cable set up - it actually plays pretty well and the password system even saved your weapons/ammo.
This played automatically after SegaLordx’s recent Doom’s SegaCD mod update video in Nov. 2024, six years later. The consistency and quality of you craft Derek, makes watching this so many years later so seamless and comforting.
Taking into account of the 3DO port of Doom and Randy Scott, Scott basically pulled a Peter Molyneux #GuruLarry
3:06 The levels were redesigned to be more efficient, which made them the obvious candidates for use on more resource constrained systems.
Having the raw storage space isn't a huge benefit in this instance. You have to fit the entire map into memory, unless you're willing/able to load chunks into memory on the fly, and then the geometry/textures have to be simple enough to render quickly.
Burger Becky is the true hero of this story. It was an unenviable position, but she DID IT against all odds.
Saturn Doom looked so bad that I didn't notice that the video drop from 480p (where it usually is because I'm on my phone) to 144p.
I feel like Rebecca Heineman story you talk about is something that happens all over the video game and creative industries. A lot of silent suffering and people willing to accept unfair circumstances financially because they can’t handle the business side of things. Not trying to downplay Burger Becky, I somehow became friends with her on fb when I was trying to learn snes assembly language. She’s a legend!
How come the Jaguar video has kinda like, a halftone pattern over it
Thanks man! always a good time at SSFF! Was waiting for this follow up!
I don’t mind the no sound thing; it actually makes me feel like i’m there, it’s more immersive
I don't know if I've ever suggested this to you before, but I would totally love to see at least one episode of Punching weight dedicated to Doom WADs. It's a bit outside the norm, but honestly, I adore the way people have stretched Doom far past it's breaking point for the last 2 decades so much and would love to hear of some WADs that have stuck out to you personally for being ambitious or just weird. It's one of the reasons why, whenever anyone asks recommendations for cheap games, I always say that Doom and Doom 2 are the most value you'll ever get for under 10€.
We have co-op doom! In the form of many engines. The most common being Zandronum. However, Doomseeker is used FOR multiplayer. Once the server is chosen, it opens Zandronum along with the server its trying to get into
Doom Legacy too, it's a rather old port that I find that preserves really well the original software graphics (specially colors) and the controls feel like the original too. That being said, I still think the most loyal port ever is Doom95, but I don't have a clue if it runs in modern systems.
FeelingShred i agree.
Skelly belly crew represent! Awesome work as always!
Hey, I have two Jaguars, Two Controllers (well five, one rotary dial, two normal, and two pro controllers), two catboxes, and... one copy of Doom... guess I could get a second, but the Jaguar is getting expensive to collect for.
i like the brown and dark contrast on the Jaguar version. it would be cool to have that option in any of the current source ports of Doom.
Whaaaaat? Just since a couple of days I started to play doom again (with some incredible mods, like Simon‘s Destiny or the Hocus Pocus mod, which you should actually check out, too) and here you are uploading part 2 of Doom Ports!
Saturn Doom remains the only game I've ever taken back to the shop because it was crap! As soon as I exchanged my copy (I said my brother had bought one too), the very next guy brought his copy back too! The guy behind the counter shot me a look and said "I guess it's rubbish then" and I said "yeah, but I've got rid of my copy now!"
On a related note, I actually loved the SNES version back in the day! I'd learned to play Doom in school as someone had installed it on the school's PC (we only had one) and I relished the chance to play it at home, but a PC was way out of our price range. My only fault with SNES Doom at the time was a lack of save games or passwords, but this just meant that I got to know the early levels very, very well!
You should have reviewed the DOOM version they ported to cars.
Yes, Cars. You have to honk to shoot.
Yeah, but who wants to be DOOMed in a car? :)
I kinda hope your joking 😑
Recently I was gonna get the GBA port but I found out about DS Doom, a homebrew you can run on a linker.
Yes, it's basically Doom on the NDS, with the upper screen showing the action and the bottom screen showing the map and HUD. It's based on the freeware version of Doom so it only includes the first chapter, and it's got a few issues, such as the fact that you can't remap the buttons, but it runs great and is really just a joy to play. Highly recommended. Make sure you get the latest version, though, 1.4 or something, as the earlier ones have bigger issues such as the absence of music.
Actually you can remap controls
Wow, I think this is one of your finest works. Bravo and thank you.
Saturn always had the coolest boxart cover honestly
I'm surprised you never mentioned the SNES port's online deathmatch. That is probably one of the most "Punching Weight" things ever.
As a kid playing it every night at Tower Records/Tower Video, I loved that the Jaguar port had no music- it was infinitely more creepy and empty, adding to the tension and making me want to take things slowly. I felt like sneaking up on everything.
Playing Heretic without music invokes that feeling too, with the bonus of ambient sounds added to the engine
This was so cool! I just went looking for a side by side comparison of the Doom ports after some nostalgia for the SNES version. What I found was so much better! BRB looking for the 3DO soundtrack hahaha
Doom Saturn if selfish Carmack let them use the SlaveDriver Engine, it would've looked gorgeous.
Another fascinating look at Doom's history :) For anyone interested in hearing Rebecca Heineman's full account of the shit she had to deal with to get the 3DO port done in time, it's on her channel, here.
ua-cam.com/video/rBbIil2HPSU/v-deo.html
The problem about simplified level design wasn't storage but available memory. If you look up the Doom 32x 090694 prototype (Which still has the PC textures and levels), you'll notice firsthand how unstable the framerate was and that will make you glad they made those compromises.
Doom on the snes didn't have that problem despite having the PC levels because it was technically a 3d-accelerated port via Super FX 2.
Back in 2009-2011 my Middle School years were spent listening to the Doom 3do soundtrack along with other stellar vgm soundtracks. Unfortunately never really got to play doom back then, my first true doom experience outside of that one scene of doom in Charlie Brown & Chocolate The Factory, was playing the GBA port on an emulator..........Left a foul taste for some time but, after playing how it was meant to be played on PC I can see that it is a very impressive game worthy of its acclaimed status.
Another good doom game to cover is impressive Doom 2 ports: Doom 2 GBA is far more impressive than Doom GBA: it has all the original weapons, monsters, and levels without any cuts. Doom 2 was also on the tapwave zodiac, and the game speed is increased.
GBA Doom II has a customized engine that changed some minor aspects of game play. Also, two of the larger original PC levels had to be split into individual halves, and some others had to have chunks cut out, or barriers added to reduce object and texture loads. Still, it's a great and clever GBA port.
Zodiac Doom II is a more accurate port overall, but the controls were pretty bad.
Classic DOOM Interesting, I guess there were technically some level design cuts.
Still, you're getting the complete Doom 2 package with the GBA version. Too bad it's so expensive...
the only real cut was green blood instead of red (since it's rated T for Teen)
But that's a small compromise
I know you made a video on Doom 64 before as the HVGN but I want to comment on how awesome Doom 64 is. Im playing through it on cartridge right now after playing through it using Doom 64 EX and it just amazing. As a seasoned classic Doomer the level design is on par with the Plutonia Experiment and has amazing control and frame rate. Goldeneye and Turok are great an all but Doom 64 is just so smooth and refined. I wish it was successful back in the day so that the sequel that was planned would have been made. The sequel would have re-added the revenant, chaingunner, archvile, and spidermastermind that was missing in Doom 64. The sequel would have used a larger cartridge size. The Doom 64 engine is so robust and smooth for n64 that I bet a full 2-player coop mode and 4 player deathmatch would have possible on one system. With the expansion pack I bet four player coop would have been possible. Sadly Doom 64 was missmarketed (it should have been called Doom: Absolution or Doom 64: The Absolution) and people were moving away from 2.5 to full 3d Quake-like even at the cost of frame rate and gameplay.
I love the n64 and it's library but I will agree that often times the n64's anti-aliasing was detrimental. In Doom 64 it just works so well.
In a future Doom Punching Weight, talk about the odd GBA port of Doom II. Why? It, unlike its predecessor, doesn't use the Doom engine. It uses some other GBA FPS engine.
Interesting video! Soberdwarf did a great job editing.
3:27 "Yeah I said it! GBA version! Fight me!"
*Looks at Derek... raises fists up... then stands next to him, ready to fight the crowd*
Derek, we got this... Let's go...
Super late to the party, but maximum respect for using midi versions of the Anarchy Reigns soundtrack ❤
As probably one of the only people who actually played 3do Doom when it was new (alongside 3d0 Gex which I will argue is the best game on the system), I did not notice how bad it was. I was just excited to be playing Doom, this great game that my 2nd grade class was talking about. Nostalgia goggles are amazing things. Wish my uncle still had that 3do. But, oh well.
The Saturn engine would have been tailor made for the Saturn chipset, using both processors. I would love to see the Original beta.
Just found out you're attending Retro World Expo in Hartford CT this fall, SO HYPE. Can't wait to meet you and talk some Punching Weight :D
I'm surprised there was no mention of how on the 3DO version Doom guy's head exploded when he died at the bottom. That wasn't something that happened on any other port was it?
That poor woman. Do you have any plans to elaborate or flesh out her full story, all games and such? It may even garner you a good interview at some point. I will say, the SNES version was poor, but dammit, I loved it and Wolfenstein 3D. (mainly because my dad wouldn't let me play on our PC...but it was ok for him to...lol).
I wanted to say thank you for continuing what you do. You were one of the inspirations for my failed attempt at reviewing a game, so I am looking at donating on patreon, with the hope that one day a few of the obscure games I enjoyed growing up could get at least a bit of play on your stream. Keep up the good work, both of you.
Her own account of the whole development process is here, on her channel, and what a disaster it was. What an incredibly skilled programme she is, I'm honestly amazed at how she got it to work at all.
ua-cam.com/video/rBbIil2HPSU/v-deo.html
here's something interesting about Doom on SNES: Not only does it have mouse support, but it also has SuperScope support.
The irony is that now, people know the source code well enough that the homebrew version of Doom for the Nintendo Switch was made in 45 minutes.
Or that there is a printer version of Doom out there
I actually stared at the screen in horror when "all you need for a port is a commercial copy of the game" dropped and then it kept escalating.
A little interesting fact about Bill Heineman AKA Burger Becky. In November of 2003, Heineman was diagnosed with gender identity disorder and began the transition from Bill Heineman into Rebecca Ann Heineman, a transgender woman. Now kown as Burger Becky.
Good video. Nice upbeat attitude. Doom is a great game to have on many systems and it is wise to avoid slagging the ports off for graphics quality reasons. Now why is that? Well, it is worth remembering that it was on the PC (pretty much entirely, and I won't go into say the Mac etc) at first and it changed the system requirements people wanted for a PC that might play games. It also drastically eroded other computer expectations like the Mac or Amiga and atari (e.g. Falcon or ST) and so on. So basically that meant if a person could get *ANY* PC (even borrowed) to play the game, they would do. It was a bit like that for wolfenstein3D too.
So for example you might get a bunch of friends hunched around somebody's sibling's PC playing Doom with all the settings turned down on a 386, or maybe, if you were lucky, a low end 486. Playing the game on a crappy console system, while not always optimal was still at least something fun while you invested your hopes for the console mainly in other games.
It is easy to take easy pot shots at some crappy console graphics, but it is worth respecting that the tolerance for those graphics means that the game has since been shoehorned into systems (even the amiga and genesis/megadrive) in ways that should not seem possible, and that is largely thanks to the patience people have by not slagging it all off or being too negative. Not only that but the ways in which it then gets coded again for various system optimisations is great. For example "ami Doom" (doom for the amiga) can have massive emphasis on an FPU even though it might be on an upgraded Amiga A500. And then you might get a version for an FPU which is incapable of transcendental operations.
When you consider the c64 has doom and yet the A500 ws often the logical upgrade step for such commodore users, it is heartwarming to see optimisations followed by more custom FPU optimisations and then more upon that.
As an aside, a link cable console version such as the Saturn version, if coded nowadyasould actually run faster if you use distributed computing OO coding (and some bare metal coding) to share the processing power. It would run faster on two linked machines than on one machine. It would be as if the master machine gets the coding power of both machines ti run just its own game. Then you can send something like a video stream from the master machine to the slave. The reason why that would work is because most of the world generation could be done (live in realtime) as pre-calc, and the display drawn to the screen is really just leftover processing power. The "left over processing power" for display is the only thing coded twice, and it would be barely anything in terms of processor power compared to the old version. Think about it for a while and it makes sense.
I have a very special story to tell, special to me anyways haha. Doom on the jaguar was the first time I had ever played doom. I was one of those weird and rare kids who not only wanted a jaguar but also had the means. The means being a grandmother who loved me very much. The premise was that I earned an allowance and that if I wanted X item, I would have to pay back the loan with allowance to afford it. well you can imagine that didnt go always as planned...sometimes grandmother would abuse the terms and over spend. shes still alive and I love her dearly. she is a mother to me when I needed one the most. I was always taught to sell off a system if i wanted to afford a new one and thus it went, I had a jaguar on launch day and the jaguar cd on its launch day and between those two consoles I played doom for the first time and myst for the first time and both went on to become top franchises of my life. played them all and read all the books to both franchises. they mean alot to me doom especially, also resident evil as many can agree
I love 3DO Doom's soundtrack. Yeha tahst right fight me. I love the original as well but 3DO is a unique separate style of the music. Becky herself is also a hero to make something like this within WEEKS. She really is a legendary part of Doom history. We salute you.
The Jaguar's levels were used for the PS1 and GBA versions not because of the space limitations you're thinking of, but because of a different kind of space limit. I'm referring to Memory, or RAM if you prefer. The PS1 only had 2MB of System Memory and 1MB of Video Memory. PC Doom claims to require 4MB of RAM and highly recommends 8MB (though you can actually get it to boot with less). The Jaguar levels were already redesigned for a low memory enviroment since the Jag only had 2MB itself, so the levels would run much more smoothly on the PS1. You may notice that the Doom 2 levels on Custom Playstation Edition run pretty terribly and at least one of them is prone to crashing right at level load. The Jag levels don't have that issue
The primary limiting factor that would make the fully textured PC levels impractical on PlayStation isn't storage space but rather texture memory - the PSX version runs extremely tight on available RAM as it is. There are very strict limits imposed on the amount of textures and sprites that can be used per level.
Yeah, a main reason the Arch-Vile was cut from the Doom II Episode was that it came with a pile of artwork.
Didn't the Jaguar version of Doom have simplified level geometry to reduce the load on the CPU? Because id Tech 1 is *very* CPU-heavy while consoles at the time had very slow CPUs.
Do you plan to look at the fan-made N64 version of Doom? As in the original Doom, not Doom 64!
One Word to describe your vids: Quality.
Great Work! Cheers!
6:05 Ive never seen that animation before. I love it.
8:42 No mention of the doom guy face splatter. That was pretty cool.
The screenshots on the Saturn's case were also used on the Collector's Edition for Doom on PC, so they've been used for a long time apparently.
The main reason the maps were simplified was because of memory constraints. The DOS version required 4MBs of RAM, the Jaguar has 2MB. So the so called "engine limits" are lower and they kept butchering the maps until they didn't crash!
Yeah that's a deal breaker when the Atari Jaguar version of Doom does not have music it is a total flop for me but I also heard they got a port Homebrew of Doom for with music on the Jaguar now I'd like to hear it
Some really strange decisions huh.
Indeed, why port Jaguar doom onto hardware that could clearly handle the original game's levels just fine?
And storage space certainly would be a factor in some minor cases. How large IS doom anyway?
Wouldn't surprise me if the crazy person that created the SNES doom only limited the sprites because of storage space constraints...
Then again, who can say...
Probably one of the most difficult versions to analyse technically, given it likely being entirely written in assembly. And not just any assembly, but the exceedingly obscure SuperFX assembly at that. XD
Actually, talking about SNES doom again gets me wondering about NTSC vs PAL...
I assume there's no meaningful difference because the code wasn't changed to benefit from it...
But assuming the code is DMA limited rather than SuperFX limited, the PAL version has roughly double the amount of DMA time per frame.
That's always a major concern for anything on the SNES that is being rendered by an external chip - Starfox is hard capped at 20 FPS regardless of what the SuperFX can manage, simply because if you consider that it appears to render at roughly 224x192 in 16 colours... (well, 4 bits per pixel. Given 8/16 background palettes that's up to 121/241 colours, but it's difficult to combine 3d graphics rendering in realtime with palette switches that have to be on tile boundaries.)...
The reduced resolution is already used to gain more DMA time. 224x192x4 bits = 21,504 bytes.
That's how much data you have to push to draw a frame.
On an NTSC machine, you have 262 lines, and with forced blanking you can use any line on which you aren't drawing anything to do DMA - 178 bytes per line, 70 lines = 12,460 bytes per frame.
So, with careful thought You could get that to 2 frames per screen update, which would be 30 fps, but I suppose they couldn't manage it for some reason. (maybe I'm optimistic about the horizontal resolution they used) - they did get starfox 2 pushed up to a 30 FPS cap though.
Even so, on a PAL system, with the same rendering resolution you'd have 312 lines per frame, which would mean 120 blank lines. 180 bytes per line (minor advantage of PAL machine compared to just having more blanking lines), = 21600 bytes per frame. This means if you were to optimise the code properly, the PAL version could in principle run without a framerate cap; EG instead of a 30 fps theoretical (or 20 fps actual) cap, it'd be able to hit the actual 50fps limit of a PAL system. (presuming the SuperFX can keep up, which it probably can't, but then at least you know what's limiting you.), or, barring that you could definitely hit a 25 fps cap without any doubt at all.
Still, doom isn't Starfox, and I have no idea what's most limiting it's performance. And again, I suspect little to no PAL specific optimisation was done;
That in and of itself would suggest a PAL system is spending a decent chunk of each frame completely idle, since it has neither game code, nor DMA to perform...
Ah well. XD
It's actually not that strange.
The biggest reason would've been the limited storage space, both on an actual cartridge as well as in VRAM - all those textures need storage space and memory, and remember, the original Doom required 4 MB of RAM on a PC in 1993. Even that was considered threadbare - id recommended 8 MB of RAM. Needless to say, no console of the time had 8 MB of memory - so that means less textures, and at that point, you're no longer running the original game's levels since you're compromising on texture choices.
The first one that could actually plausibly run the original Doom unfettered would've been the N64 for that reason (though that's a fairly recent development), and the first one that actually got made and was widespread was the Dreamcast due to its 16 MB of RAM, and that ran it rather well.
Also, some maps got highly complex - if it's too complex in terms of geometry in view, you'd overload and crash the renderer. This is why the new maps are very blocky, and much of the original maps had simplifications to make them chunkier.
The Playstation could've handled most of the original Doom levels, but development laziness and cost meant it got saddled with the gimped Jaguar assets.
Did you read my other comment where I said hackers have the PS1 port cracked open to the point of running custom maps on it, and that we have found that no, it definitely CANNOT handle most of the original Doom levels unaltered?
In the PS1 version, for example, VRAM limits force you to a limit of 16 flats. All floors, all ceilings - you can pick sixteen textures to do them all. There's many Doom maps in the PC version which use more than those. The second you change this, you might have the original geometry still, but no way are using the original maps anymore.
Sidedef textures also have limits, though it's a bit more flexible. In PS1 Doom, textures are one of four sizes: 16x128, 64x128, 128x128, or (skies only) 256x128. You have enough room to fit 6 256x128 textures, 12 128x128 textures, 32 64x128 textures, or 192 16x128 textures in the VRAM.
Obviously, maps will need a combination of different sizes. Here's one example of a map I'm porting to the PS1 game (TNT Evilution MAP05: Hanger if you're curious), and as you'll see, I've filled up all of my flat and texture spaces:
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/439707595494653962/463090269441490954/unknown.png
I literally do not have room for any more textures. I have thus become forced to compromise on that.
Then, even when I had that sorted out, due to the PS1's limited RAM, the map failed to allocate - the geometry was so complex that it'd just plain run out of RAM. I had to cut three entire (and mostly disused) monster types from the map before it would finally load.
Lastly, due to weirdnesses with the renderer, I've had to alter some rooms slightly in order to make the game run faster, not crash due to too many vertices being in view, or to work around texture-mapping bugs (the PS1 game apparently will flip a texture entirely if you give it a negative Y offset).
Trust me when I say this: Simplifcations were needed, for a lot of reasons.
I knew people just recently cracked the PSX Doom code, but I haven't looked into it much yet. Didn't read your comment, sorry.
Imagine how easy a person could make an official 3DO game in 2020