Ever played Doom on Amiga?

[commodorejohn]

Tried it for kicks on my 030/50 A1200 once. Fun for the sake of it, but it really needs a system with meaningful amounts of cache to be playable, whether on 68k or x86. (I got a major boost on the original just going from 128KB to 256KB cache on my 386DX-40, no other changes required.) No surprise that, IIRC, the Mac version either recommended or required an 040.

played it a little on my TF330 (68030@50mhz) on my Cd32 , and while its ok ,i tried more out of curiosity than actually wanting to play it on my Amiga.

Got plenty of other platforms to play it much better, like Xbox,PC,Switch.

But as a novelty that an Amiga can run Doom,its quite impressive.

[Gribnitz]

I did not know a port of Doom was made for Amiga

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Gribnitz

I did not know a port of Doom was made for Amiga

There is probably a port of Doom for your calculator

[Nobby_UK]

Originally Posted by gimbal

There is probably a port of Doom for your calculator

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And even on a Camera:

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[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

I had a simple hack that, if you had 32 megs of fast memory, you could copy the wad file to the RAM disk and use a soft link to point to it. That got rid of the hard drive accesses in-game except for saving and loading game saves. It also speeded up gameplay on my Blizzard 1230.

Interesting hack. How could I pull this off if I was to try it? It's quite clever actually.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

Interesting hack. How could I pull this off if I was to try it? It's quite clever actually.

The trick is to name the wad file wrong or put it in a different directory so ADoom doesn't see it on the hard drive. I named mine doomu.wadd and the softlink doomu.wad. Then you just write a script to launch that checks if RAM:doomu.wadd exists and if not copy from the hard drive to the ramdisk. The softlink also needs to look for the misspelled file if you do it the easy way.

[Seiya]

as i remember many years ago with DoomAttack (the best and the fastest doom port for Amiga) and my Blizzard 1230-iv@50 Mhz, the first 3 episodes of Doom was playable at 13/14 fps. The 4th episode very slow. Doom 2 unplayable. i buyed Apollo 1240 with 68040@40 Mhz.
then i finished 4th episode of Doom and then Doom2

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by Seiya

as i remember many years ago with DoomAttack (the best and the fastest doom port for Amiga) and my Blizzard 1230-iv@50 Mhz, the first 3 episodes of Doom was playable at 13/14 fps. The 4th episode very slow. Doom 2 unplayable. i buyed Apollo 1240 with 68040@40 Mhz.
then i finished 4th episode of Doom and then Doom2

What was it like with the Apollo?

[Havie]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

What was it like with the Apollo?

I had an Apollo 040 40mhz and had a blast playing doom (I used Doom Attack if I remember) as it seemed perfectly playable to me. I got along way in but never finished it.

This was after finishing Gloom and Alien Breed 3D first though- got to keep things Amiga!

[jotd]

on a 060/50 it was okay. I think I was using RTG through ATEO Pixel64 gfx board which may have avoided c2p. I played on a 486/66 roughly at the same time and it was maybe slightly smoother.

I completed the classic levels on my 68060. That was amazing to be able to play this game on a classic amiga.

In comparison, MAME sucked on a 68060

[redblade]

Shouldn't Doom with a Amiga RTG be as fast as PC versions because it doesn't have to do c2p?? Or does the sound slow it down?

Would like to see a classic MAME for Amiga that plays the classics.

[fitzsteve]

I often play Doom on my Amigas, one of the applications that stretches the legs of those 060 and PPCs. Even back when I had only an A1200 with 030 it performed very well, I use ADoom and often play various WAD conversions.

With 060 and RTG it's a lovely smooth experience. Novacoder has done a couple of great ports, Boom and AmiDoom which are well worth a look, full mouse support, etc.

On PPC you can enjoy PrBoom which is very pretty.

Ps, you can also Doom on an A600, see here my old A600 with ACA630 and Indivision ECS (Using chunky 256col mode from the indi)

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[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Foebane

I first saw Doom on a friend's multimedia 486 in early 1994, with all the bells and whistles. I was awestruck by the detailed texture mapping on the walls, floors and ceilings, the lighting effects, the fast scaling, audio and just generally everything about it. I knew then that I was looking at the future

Fair enough, but to me it looked every bit as clunky and ugly then as it seems now. It was the same with many PS1 games - such early 3D with textures that were too low in resolution and detail, and clunky pseudo-3D scaling sprites were too much of a distraction for me to really get into such games. while I could understand the hype, so many games of that era were so underwhelming for me. There were a few exceptions on the PS1 where things were smooth enough to become something I could actually call the future (e.g. Wipeout, Wipeout 2097, Colony wars). It wasn't until the N64 that it finally started to become tolerable on the whole, and the PS2 / Gamecube era when it was proper 3D that I could immerse myself in. On the PC end of things, that was essentially Quake 3 / Unreal sort of era, when I finally found PC FPS games become what I felt was decent 3D. Anything before that felt then, as it does now, like an ugly mess of pixels.

[duga]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Fair enough, but to me it looked every bit as clunky and ugly then as it seems now. It was the same with many PS1 games - such early 3D with textures that were too low in resolution and detail, and clunky pseudo-3D scaling sprites were too much of a distraction for me to really get into such games. while I could understand the hype, so many games of that era were so underwhelming for me. There were a few exceptions on the PS1 where things were smooth enough to become something I could actually call the future (e.g. Wipeout, Wipeout 2097, Colony wars). It wasn't until the N64 that it finally started to become tolerable on the whole, and the PS2 / Gamecube era when it was proper 3D that I could immerse myself in. On the PC end of things, that was essentially Quake 3 / Unreal sort of era, when I finally found PC FPS games become what I felt was decent 3D. Anything before that felt then, as it does now, like an ugly mess of pixels.

While I understand what you mean regarding PS1 games and some really blurry N64 games, I've never felt the same regarding Doom (which I played on a Pentium 90 in 1995).

[Solo Kazuki]

Originally Posted by Gribnitz

I did not know a port of Doom was made for Amiga

Are You not joking? Because Doom is only one of such games for Amiga.

I've played on my Amiga (BPPC with 603@160MHz + 040@40MHz) not only Doom, but also Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D and even Quake (PPC).

Edit: Some games are still missing on HoL, e.g. both Blake Stone games.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

On the PC end of things, that was essentially Quake 3 / Unreal sort of era, when I finally found PC FPS games become what I felt was decent 3D. Anything before that felt then, as it does now, like an ugly mess of pixels.

Aaah, Quake 3 Arena, the first Quake I truly thought was eye-candy. Quake may have made the leap into true 3D, but it was so lacking in other areas, all brown and blue as well, and then Quake 2 tried coloured lighting in hardware but ended up looking orange. And then Quake 3 Arena comes along and looks bright, vibrant and so animated! The shaders really made a huge difference, whereas the old Quakes looked so flat and lifeless in their appearance. Out of all the Quakes, I think Q3A still looks great to this day. The only thing that would make it beyond perfect would be specular highlights and normal mapping, but then we have Doom 3 for that, which is another favourite engine of mine.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by redblade

Shouldn't Doom with a Amiga RTG be as fast as PC versions because it doesn't have to do c2p?? Or does the sound slow it down?

The problem is apparently that RTG graphics on the Amiga are still normally on a fairly slow bus, which means the gains over native graphics are going to be limited*. Doom really likes fast memory and fast access to the graphics card to work well.

This is why the PC version on a 386 with extra cache and a Vesa Local Bus card (yes, these things actually existed even though the VLB was designed for 486 processors - Amiga's are apparently not the only "Frankenstein" systems out there ) generally runs as well or better than Doom on a 486 with ISA VGA card.

*) On fast enough Amiga's the chunky to planar conversion is about as fast as just copying chunky pixel data over the AGA bus (so about 7MB/sec). The Zorro-III bus in an A4000 comes in at a max of about 13.5MB/sec. Since the game does a lot more than just copy pixel data over (other stuff won't be sped up by a faster video bus), you're end up looking at a smaller than expected gain.

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On the topic of frame rates, I think whether or not a game is playable also has to do with our expectations. These days it's normal for 3D games to run at 30 or 60FPS. Back in the Doom days, it was still quite acceptable if you didn't manage such speeds. I recall playing Alien Breed 3DII on a 68030/50MHz and genuinely thinking it played fine. Same with Doom, my friend ran it on a slow VGA card 386 and it chugged along, yet we were fine with it.

Nowadays though, such low frame rates are far less acceptable and the old slow running games seem quite bad.

[nogginthenog]

Originally Posted by gimbal

There is probably a port of Doom for your calculator

I ran Doom on my MP3 player. Black & white Sansa Clip.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by nogginthenog

I ran Doom on my MP3 player. Black & white Sansa Clip.

So did I, and in colour on a later model from Sandisk, too.

I just tried DoomAttack, and I LOVE the configuration options; I am now able to play with my specialist keys and I'm whizzing around the maps, pwning all the demons. Now all I need to complete my Amiga Doom package is a music plugin.