Wolfenstein ports on the real hardware

Kevin is uploading some Wolfenstein gameplay on his KWKBOX youtube channel.

Giant rats, backpacks from Doom, no blood, no swastikas, no Hitler portraits, less bloody HUD sprites, 199 bullets instead of 99, max 299 with backpacks(?) No sprite rotations, so no enemy patrols or getting the jump on themm I guess. The mapset is cut down to the extreme, you are defeating the first boss in floor 3, wtf! They cut down the enemy german voices generally.

At least it has two new ghetto-ass clunky weapons, a flame thrower and a rocket launcher. It also has an awesome automap with textured tiles!

First boss in the third level is from the Mac version.

The ports are strange, the maps of the SNES are the same as the ones in the Jaguar and Mac ports, minus the floors stayed brown in the Jaguar and were re-colored to gray in the Mac. Which explains the odd brown shading on objects. It's thought the reason why they made the floor brown to begin with was to better contrast with the stupid gray rats in the SNES.

Then of course you got the simplified Jaguar Doom levels that were re-used in the PSX version but had color lighting added.

This one is high res, fullscreen with no HUD and runs better, no censoring, they did away with the lives and the treasure gives health above 100! It has an automap, music on/off button and quicksave.

The weapon sprites are better, the chaingun and the rocket launcher sprites are the ones from Doom!

I think the maps are again these cutdown versions, condensed episodes etc.

The mac version was the first one I saw the higher res weapon sprites in, so that's always what I associate with those. And I'm still wondering why the PC original sprites are so heavily pixelated.

I finally got around to reading Masters of Doom recently and it covers the development of the SNES port. It was initially being worked on by one guy at id, but he also had a contract with Interplay at the time which meant that anything he did was also the property of Interplay, so when the rest of id found out about this they fired him and quickly finished the port themselves. I wonder how the port would have turned out if they had more time and actual passion for the project, since nobody really wanted to do it at the time.

The enemies all have the same generic "Stop!" and "Halt!" voices not so much due to just censorship but probably due to limitations with the SNES sound chip. The RAM is very rigid in that switching out different samples on the fly, as you might otherwise do, is a very difficult task. Couple that with the fact that the instrument samples have to fight for the same memory space as the sound effects, there's usually not a whole lot of space allocated to dedicated SFX samples such as voices.

PC version's art is the same as Doom's, Adrian Carmack, not sure who did the art for Mac. Mac might be higher res but it lacks rotations for actors.

That Jag port looks great. Love the use of hi-res sprites for the enemies and guns, even despite them lacking full rotations. I didn't realise the Mac version also had them, gives me a good reason to play through it again!

Doomkid said:

That Jag port looks great. Love the use of hi-res sprites for the enemies and guns, even despite them lacking full rotations. I didn't realise the Mac version also had them, gives me a good reason to play through it again!

Do yourself a favout and try Wolf3DGE
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=46801

Having played through the first 3 episodes many years back, I recently revisited Wolfenstein 3D and played through episodes 4 - 6. Nowhere near as good as Doom, but still a fantastic title, and one that hasn't aged as much as many would say it has. The ECWolf source port was quite good, as it provided a much needed auto map feature as well as a few other bells and whistles.