Carmack on Dread or Grind

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

George Sanderson asked the wrong question. Instead of "Perhaps a port of Doom for Amiga would also be a good idea ?" it should have been "How much for the rights to port Doom to the Amiga?". Then we would 'just' have to find the $200,000 that Carmack would ask for.

Actually we could just blame Team 17 for not porting Doom to the Amiga instead of John Carmack. They tried to get the rights, but I assume the price tag was just too hefty. Of course at the end of the day it is all about money.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

Actually we could just blame Team 17 for not porting Doom to the Amiga instead of John Carmack. They tried to get the rights, but I assume the price tag was just too hefty. Of course at the end of the day it is all about money.

I bet they were bloody glad they didn’t in the end! There was no way a licensed game in 1995 would have made it’s money back, most original games were probably just breaking even!

[LaBodilsen]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

I bet they were bloody glad they didn’t in the end! There was no way a licensed game in 1995 would have made it’s money back, most original games were probably just breaking even!

And yet Clickboom tried it with Quake some 3 years later?

But you are properly right, if ID still had released the source 2 years later, it would have killed any remaining sales.

[Mick]

Originally Posted by Dunny

"Yeah I said that Doom couldn't be done on an Amiga and it looks like I was right all along"

Too many compromises had to be made to get it to run in terms of geometry, colour depth and resolution, and I'm not sure he would have wanted that for Doom.

In those days lots of games were released on "lesser" platforms with compromises to graphics though, I've mentioned it in another thread but Theme Park on stock A500 looked awful compared to PC/Mac and had lots of content missing but it was still the same core gameplay and a hugely popular seller I suspect. If you hadn't seen the PC/Mac versions then you never really knew what you were missing.

So yeah it's likely he didn't want to make any sacrifices or maybe the time it would have taken coding the engine wouldn't have been profitable but looking at those two games in title I'm sure it would have been possible to release something on Amiga if they had wanted to?

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by LaBodilsen

And yet Clickboom tried it with Quake some 3 years later?

But you are properly right, if ID still had released the source 2 years later, it would have killed any remaining sales.

Well the difference is Team 17 paid their developers for the work, where as Clickboom got away with what shit they could to make a quick buck!

[LaBodilsen]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Well the difference is Team 17 paid their developers for the work, where as Clickboom got away with what shit they could to make a quick buck!

So very true

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by haps

Nice to know you can tell us what others would 'definately' appreciate.

Given Carmack is widely credited for using 2D BSP for this very purpose and to overcome the limitations of Wolf3D's raycasting engine, do you have any doubt at all he'd recognise Grind as being more Doom than Wolf? Also, KK directly responded to a tweet of his on that very matter when this all started.

[Karlos]

In fact it runs about the same speed on the A4000-040 as on a 25MHz 486, so Carmack was just showing his ignorance here

I know how hard you want this to be true, but a fact in isolation presented this way says more about your ignorance than his.

The simple fact is, your observation is only true in retrospect. In 1993, the the techniques to achieve copy speed C2P were not known to anyone except perhaps a few demo codes that were experimenting with the idea. What was known is that Doom ran on a chunky 68040 system, the colour NeXT box, and used petty much the full CPU time to do so. Consequently, in 1993, his statement was completely fair. I'm not sure yours is, in 2024.

[Torti-the-Smurf]

The Amiga was (is) a Marvelous System. Love it to this very day.
(my favorite !)



But even Jay Miner did say ; that in hindsight he would have designed the Amiga with Pixel Graphics instead of Bitmap Graphics.
But hindsight is a tricky thing.

[ Show youtube player ]

Skip to 21:31 ..... better yet; watch the whole thing

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I know how hard you want this to be true, but a fact in isolation presented this way says more about your ignorance than his.

The simple fact is, your observation is only true in retrospect. In 1993, the the techniques to achieve copy speed C2P were not known to anyone except perhaps a few demo codes that were experimenting with the idea.

Well, this isn't exactly true. By the time that mail got an answer (i.e. September 1994) seems like fast c2p routines already existed for Amiga and were publicly available at Aminet. In fact the guy Carmack answered to actually mentions this in his first mail to ID: "The lack of the chunky graphics mode has been solved via fast conversion routines (which can be found in ftp.wustl.edu:/pub/aminet or any other Aminet mirror)"

Having said that, I wouldn't fault him for not knowing but it seems even more likely that he -simply- also didn't care. In which case I wouldn't fault him for that either
Commodore was already done and buried and the market was small in comparison so an official port would make zero sense financially. I also doubt whether Carmack had any idea a quick response to such an obscure fan mail would be blown that much out of proportion and be quoted that many times in public... even 30 years later!

In any case it would be interesting indeed what he (or John) would think of Dread/Grind if they saw them now. Perhaps once Grind is complete I should send them a copy

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

I bet they were bloody glad they didn’t in the end! There was no way a licensed game in 1995 would have made it’s money back, most original games were probably just breaking even!

Chances are people would have been exclusively playing the free shareware version anyway

[Karlos]

@Tsak

I don't know the routines were that fast in 1994. I think they hit the ceiling around 96/97.

It's somewhat moot. Carmack had no interest in porting to Amiga but if someone else had approached them to do it, preferably with some proof of concept for C2P that showed its practicality, I don't think he would have objected. After all, id were happy to let Quake to be ported. The way Carmack is portrayed in these discussions, you'd expect them to laugh it off and deny any kind of port of their premium licensable IP to some crippled untermensch platform. But no, they were entirely pragmatic, licenses were paid, quality was tested and we got an official port of Quake.

We can't seem to get over the collective trauma of not having had Doom when it was new. It was 30+ years ago. Time to move on.

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by Karlos

We can't seem to get over the collective trauma of not having had Doom when it was new. It was 30+ years ago. Time to move on.

It's quite interesting though. Doom not coming to the Amiga and Carmack's remarks sparked an entire army of Amiga coders and game makers, trying to prove him wrong.
Don't you find funny how things come around and a trauma like that also becomes responsible for that much creativity?

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Karlos

We can't seem to get over the collective trauma of not having had Doom when it was new. It was 30+ years ago. Time to move on.

I'm sorry, have we met before? Hi there, I speak for EAB in this matter. Moving on is the very last thing we would do, thank you very much. If you do not want to believe it, I invite you to read literally any thread on this forum.

[tygre]

And let's not forget that the first version of Doom was developed on a NeXTcube, i.e., a 68040

Cheers!