Why a Neo Geo port of Doom is functionally impossible
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Bad Apple is an existing animation, it wasn't made by the creators of that specific demo.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtutLA63Cp8
There are Bad Apple demos for nearly every classic console out there. It's a popular subject for that kind of thing since it's monochrome and therefore feasible to reproduce under very strict technical limitations.
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Which bit? The master system animated tiles approach, or having a RPi feeding realtime-rendered tiles to the Neo Geo?
For the former, I think that's covered by the video itself, and the primitive raycaster demo.
For the latter, would the RPi need direct access to the frame buffer? All it really needs is a way for the 68k chip to feed it input data (i.e. what button is being pressed on the controller. And that could potentially be done by inserting specially crafted tile requests into the vram for the video chip to pass over to the RPi for interpretation.
Admittedly, you're essentially reducing the neo geo to a dumb terminal rather than running doom directly. And I'm guessing there would still be a lot of technical challenges which are far beyond my poor brain's ability to understand.
But if you wanted to wow your friends like it's 1994 by plugging a "doom" cart into your insanely expensive home console, that'd seem to be the way to go...
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Interesting...
I was at a music festival in Malta recently, and the sound engineer had a PC of some description sitting on his desk. Said PC had a transparent LCD side which was playing that animation!
Looks like it's something you can hack together yourself fairly cheaply; it's a shame I'm long since past the days of building fancy overclocked gaming rigs!
View: https://youtu.be/wDDcspVqFrM?si=9C6pDPEl3r960CkH
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Then there was Neo Geo CD, and its 1x CD-ROM drive was mostly compromise. I don't recommend purchasing one.
If you're looking for one to purchase, I happen to have one.
There were some interesting SNK ports on Saturn with ROM carts + CD-ROMs.
My earlier PC-FX comment was because it also was 2D-focused (and doesn't seem to have a Doom on't).
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I have a JPN AES and I did purchase a CD (cheaper games) but the unit came broken so refunded.
I'm waiting on the AES+ to see if it's the real deal or some crappy cheapo Chinese thing.
I really wish they didn't shoe-horn 3d in to the Saturn (or PSX really). So bad. So very very bad. Very little holds up and most can be dumped in a landfill.
I'm waiting on the AES+ to see if it's the real deal or some crappy cheapo Chinese thing.
I really wish they didn't shoe-horn 3d in to the Saturn (or PSX really). So bad. So very very bad. Very little holds up and most can be dumped in a landfill.
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As mentioned the home console was literally the same hardware as the arcade, and while I'm sure the hardware itself was expensive, I'm thinking the pricing was also intended to protect the arcade side of things. I don't know what Neo Geo stuff cost back then, but shopping for other arcade stuff now and then it'd be pretty common to see new PCBs for a few grand. Which of course was meant for arcade operators to make money off of a quarter (or more) at a time.
The thought process was probably something like if people could have an equivalent experience at home for cheap, they'd be less inclined to play them in arcades, devaluing the arcade boards (or cartridges in the case of Neo Geo and some other systems). So they just made it prohibitively expensive all around! Course this kinda came to be anyway, as home consoles got 3D hardware (which was the same as arcade boards in some cases) and normal priced console games, there seemed to be a shift in the arcade space to try other gimmicks to remain a unique experience.
Not sure there's a Doom port (ie using the original code) but on a quick search I found a Doom remake for Flipper Zero!
https://lab.flipper.net/apps/doom
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I would encourage anyone who thinks this is truly impossible to look at Taito’s Gun Buster, an arcade FPS that managed to run on hardware with only sprite scaling (like Neo Geo) by prebaking wall sprites at every possible rotation and scaling as necessary. Not quite Doom, but it looks a hell of a lot nicer than Wolfenstein.
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Even if it can't be done with a ROM, a special cart that does some heavy lifting would still be neat.
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The PS1 was 3D from the ground up, rather than shoehorned. If anything, it's 2D used a method of applying sprites as textures onto polygons. Whether this was the right call is debatable, but it was certainly the cheapest method, and I adored mine. The drive was the weakest link though, and then there was a slight revision past the 500x models that fixed an issue with one particular graphical effect to prevent "banding".
The AES+ is promising big time, and it's price is right, but the one thing that worries me is I have no idea how they could manage to fully reproduce the old chips on such short notice, without economies of scale to help them with pricing issues. Granted, it's got SNK's seal of approval and all, but how much does that count for now that SNK is owned by a Saudi prince? I want to believe of course, and there's more green lights than red at this point, but I wouldn't put down ANY money towards one of these things until some trusted reviewers that know a thing or two about the AES have had a chance to really put it through it's paces. They're saying a lot of the right things, but they need to get a demo unit in someone's hands if they really want to settle all doubts.
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The problem is the carts don't have direct access to video output, so even THAT is prevented by it's design. A real solution is going to have to be... VERY creative.
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Ohhh, I see now. It's not really my "thing" but I see it's value purely as a tech demo.
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I think a Wolfenstein-style maze could be made by pre-rendering wall segment sprites at different angles and displaying each segment scaled ("sprite shrinking") on the horizontal and vertical.
Because each sprite is 16 pixels wide at most and can only be shrunk down to 1, walls would also need to be pre-rendered at at least 2× scale, probably at 4× scale, etc.
The player would be restricted to orientations for which there exist pre-rendered wall sprites, but I think moving forwards/backwards and strafing left/right could be made to look smooth.
The hardware is restricted to displaying rectangular sprites. For a Doom-style maze which has different floor heights to be rendered using a similar method, the hardware would also have needed to be able to display sprites sheared into parallelogram shapes, and I can't find that it could do that.
Edit:
Because each sprite is 16 pixels wide at most and can only be shrunk down to 1, walls would also need to be pre-rendered at at least 2× scale, probably at 4× scale, etc.
The player would be restricted to orientations for which there exist pre-rendered wall sprites, but I think moving forwards/backwards and strafing left/right could be made to look smooth.
The hardware is restricted to displaying rectangular sprites. For a Doom-style maze which has different floor heights to be rendered using a similar method, the hardware would also have needed to be able to display sprites sheared into parallelogram shapes, and I can't find that it could do that.
Edit:
I found gameplay videos of that on YouTube. It seems they did it like how I described above except that they don't seem to restrict the player's orientation much and therefore there are visual artefacts: The corners between wall segments are not always connected: they are shifted several pixels on the vertical when there are no 100% matching sprites.
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I'd count it as a port so long as the gameplay is sufficiently accurate, even if the graphics are incredibly reduced. Then again, that's the difference between Doom and Tetris porting. With Doom, it's easy to port because we have the source code. With Tetris, it's easy to port because the base concept and rules are just THAT simple that it can be recreated, from scratch, and still be as accurate to the https://tetris.wiki/Tetris_Guideline as they want it to be. Since the license itself is owned by the Tetris Company, (as it should be, after all those years where the original creator was basically stiffed over and over again), they'll just slap some alternate name since gameplay mechanics can't be copyright protected... and at this point even if there was a software patent on it it would have long expired by now.
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That makes sense.
I tended to think it was just expensive kit. Maybe the unit itself was high but those carts could not have been cheap to produce.
Running a 24 meg SNES cart for like 70$. I can see a 300 meg Neo cart being in excess of a couple hundred.
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i do feel like, the enemies have a limited number of positions (which could be done with sprites) and they could be scaled. The walls, you'd have a limited number of angles, and they can be scaled too. It appears this is being done with that Wolfenstein 3D demo. But, it'd be an extensive rewrite, and very difficult to do. (The mention of windows and diagonal walls and such could throw a fly in the ointment.) It's CERTAINLY ill-suited for Doom for sure.
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Well that's the way most sprites are handled now on modern hardware so I would say overall it was the right call even if it was by necessity since the PS1 had no 2D specific hardware. It did give them some things by default that were difficult to do with regular 2D operations, like scaling, alpha blending, 2D on 3D etc. The problem was that the PS1 had so little ram and sprites would need a lot texture data to be either in memory or streamed in and out of the disk.
I remember being quite impressed with Guilty Gear when that first came out. They were doing some crazy zooming in on the characters during some moves. Then there was Legend of Mana which looked absolutely gorgeous at the cost of horrendous load times.
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