Playstation Doom on PS2

I've long been a proponent of the console versions of Doom.  I visit infrequently because I'm scatterbrained and busy, but when I do stop by, that's usually what I talk about.  I view them as a separate fork of the game that began with Jaguar/32X and evolved over time.  After all, it was the JagDoom code, levels and resources that were used to develop most of the other console Dooms, obviously excluding the Nintendo ones (because Nintendo had to be special).  But Doom 64 was worked on by Midway, same as the Playstation Doom, and they used their ideas from Playstation Doom when they developed Doom 64.  So Doom 64 is, effectively, the end of one branch of console Doom development.  So is Saturn Doom.  The Playstation has one in Final Doom.  But what about if you then pop the Playstation Dooms into a PS2, with smooth texture filtering?

I could have sworn I had a copy of Final Doom lying around, but I can't find it.  Guess I'll have to get another.  So I popped in my Playstation Doom disc after setting the appropriate settings.

The results were underwhelming.  In my quest to find the definitive console version outside of the XBLA and related versions, I was hoping for more.  But I had to remind myself that it looked worse on the original machine.  I used Youtube as a refresher instead of switching out the PS1 and PS2 back and forth for comparison.  Now don't get me wrong--the colored lighting and all that still looks great--but the resolution doesn't stand up to what we can get with a basic source port.  I think it's a good experience with that added bit of polish, and the Playstation Doom has features that vanilla Doom just doesn't.  Colored lighting, reverb, cooler sound effects, creepy ambient music and Doom 2 stuff in Doom 1 add up to an excellent experience.  And let's not forget the Nightmare Spectre.  A sad replacement for the missing Arch-Vile, but cool in its own right.  Just...not as cool.

It's worth a try if you haven't done it.  Just don't expect the graphics to look crystal clear and amazing.  It does definitely fix places where you just couldn't see at all before.  It just doesn't do much more than that.

Has anybody else tried this?  Anything similar?  I'd love to hear about your results.  How about Doom 64 with one of those N64 RAM expansion packs?

I sometimes play my ps1 Doom on a ps3 on the lounge TV and I have a jag linked up (sometimes) with jag doom.

Both versions hurt my eyes after playing for a decent amount of time, but still good fun all the same.

I kinda wish they did make a PS2 DooM... would've been awesome to play DooM/DooM 2 with my fav controller.

Yeah.  Unfortunately, Doom on PS2 would probably have been Doom 3 or an attempt to make a more perfect straight port of 1 and 2.  What I wish they had done is continue to build on what they started with the original Playstation version.  Upgrade the resolution, maybe add some features to the engine beyond colored lighting and reverb...show us what the Doom engine can be with the right hardware!  What if it had evolved forever?

Maybe take inspiration from Strife and Hexen?

I also wonder why ID didn't made some Doom for the PS2 console...I think it would be the best Doom game since that console was popular at that time.

If they had stuck with the same engine, they could have preserved the gameplay.  It was perfect.  Throw in the lighting effects of Doom 64, reverb from Playstation, then like DynamiteKaitorn said, take inspiration from Strife and Hexen as well.  After that, source ports show us what could have been next--3d models, 3d floors, hi-res, looking up and down, jumping...and we could have had an official Doom game with all that prior to the year Doom 3 was released.

19 hours ago, rabidrage said:

it was the JagDoom code, levels and resources that were used to develop most of the other console Dooms, obviously excluding the Nintendo ones (because Nintendo had to be special). 

1

GBA Doom (1) says "Hi!". GBA Doom is probably the last port ever to be based off the Jaguar codebase. And even though Doom 64 is an original game instead of a port, it still uses an engine very similar to the PSX Doom engine... which of couse was based off the Jaguar codebase.

Doom 64 was actually made on a modified version of the PSX Doom engine.  Not just similar.  Like, Midway continued to tweak it for Doom 64 after the tweaks they made for the PSX.  So extrapolate further and you can see what's possible.

Props for acknowledging where the GBA Doom fits into all this.  Then Doom II for GBA was made on the Southpaw engine.  They apparently split a level in two on GBA Doom for some reason, probably having to do with processing constraints.  But I'd love to see a port/conversion of it to PC.

I recommend looking up the Doom 64 tech bible.  It makes a fascinating read!

Don't expect it to look much better on PS2 than on PSX; the renderer actually works like the software renderer, just pushes each column as polygons. Unless it were somehow hacked to be higher resolution, you'll never get more than 256 visible columns.

On that note, I find it regretful that they didn't correct the aspect ratio. Not only do the levels look squished down; it would've been crisper vertically than PC Doom, essentially for free, and would make up for the loss in horizontal res IMO.

16 hours ago, rabidrage said:

Doom 64 was actually made on a modified version of the PSX Doom engine.  Not just similar.  Like, Midway continued to tweak it for Doom 64 after the tweaks they made for the PSX.  So extrapolate further and you can see what's possible.

 

Props for acknowledging where the GBA Doom fits into all this.  Then Doom II for GBA was made on the Southpaw engine.  They apparently split a level in two on GBA Doom for some reason, probably having to do with processing constraints.  But I'd love to see a port/conversion of it to PC.

 

I recommend looking up the Doom 64 tech bible.  It makes a fascinating read!

a couple actually. Industrial Zone and The Chasm had to be split up because of large map sizes.

though someone did made a wad extractor for the GBA Doom II a while back so here it is:

The behavior of PlayStation Doom doesn't change when it's played on PS2 - it's being run on a copy of the PSOne hardware inside the console. Likewise, Doom 64 does not support the Nintendo 64 RAM expansion. It will never use it even if one is installed - doing so requires special programming in the cartridge to deliberately make use of that RAM and Doom 64 has no such coding.

I own all of these and the consoles to play them on, and have cooperated in their reverse engineering.

23 minutes ago, Quasar said:

Likewise, Doom 64 does not support the Nintendo 64 RAM expansion. It will never use it even if one is installed - doing so requires special programming in the cartridge to deliberately make use of that RAM and Doom 64 has no such coding.

So this whole time I've been playing Doom 64 on the real N64 lately, the RAM booster has been giving no benefit? And here I thought it was running better than without it.

Indeed the RAM booster is only good for higher-resolution sprites/textures mostly and Doom 64 didn't implement those. But even if they had them it likely would tax the graphics processing and actually reduce the frame rate of the game (this was a problem for many games that used the RAM expansion). I never knew though that the PS2 had smoothing options, apparently PS3 has them too for PS1 emulation. I will try them out!

But with that said, Doom 64 is my favorite out of all the versions you mentioned, just turn the brightness to max within the in-game settings.

Outside of Doom 64, I find texture filtering to be rather ugly. It just doesn't do the sprites any favours, and because of the way that PSX Doom renders its walls close-up, it doesn't really benefit much there, either.

I'm actually playing through PSX Doom again at the moment on original hardware. The only thing that's aged for me is the control scheme. but it diesn't take long for the old muscle memory to kick in and I'm running rings around the demons like like on PC. That said, can't wait to get to Final Doom so I can bust out the PSX mouse...

40 minutes ago, scalliano said:

Outside of Doom 64, I find texture filtering to be rather ugly. It just doesn't do the sprites any favours, and because of the way that PSX Doom renders its walls close-up, it doesn't really benefit much there, either.

 

I'm actually playing through PSX Doom again at the moment on original hardware. The only thing that's aged for me is the control scheme. but it diesn't take long for the old muscle memory to kick in and I'm running rings around the demons like like on PC. That said, can't wait to get to Final Doom so I can bust out the PSX mouse...

Final Doom for the PS1 is one I don't own! I am kind of old school and like hunting around used game shops instead of ordering online. I am looking for that and Alien Resurrection for PS1 as well. It has been a couple years casually looking; I easily found Doom and Alien Trilogy though.

When looking for perspective on these older games, it helps to be playing them on older hardware (i.e., a CRT, preferably with a decent connection type). Blow them up on a modern HD TV without a high quality upscaler and they look like a blurry mess. Even through an upscaler with something like RGB, they still look much more natural on a CRT and you might find they have aged better than expected when playing them on the tech they were designed for. PS1 DOOM for instance looks nice and sharp on my 2001 Trinitron, as does DOOM 64. What I find more interesting is comparing the console ports on the tech they were designed to be played on, to the stock/vanilla MS-DOS versions, via the tech they were designed to be played on (an old 486 or Pentium PC, 320x200, 35fps, etc). The gap is still there when sat next to the console versions, but I don't think it's quite as large as we perceive it to be today.

Modern source ports have spoiled a lot of us, and comparing older console versions to these is kind of moot in a way. The further enhancements source ports have allowed us in modern times has filtered our perception of what PC DOOM was really like back in the day and how much it really differed from the console conversions of the time.

IMO, the PSX could easily have had a "Special Edition" re-release toward the end of its life that utilised the hardware properly. If they ditched the column rendering and went with a true polygon renderer, then there would have been no issue at all reaching 30 fps and including split-screen multiplayer. The port of Quake II shows that the PSX was capable of rendering far more complex FPSes than DOOM and I would love to see a PSX DOOM that used the hardware to its full (and unique) potential.

That exact idea was vetoed by Carmack for the Saturn version. Legend has it that Rage actually had an internal build running at 60 but Carmack wasn't a fan of the hardware texture-warping that plagued early 3D systems and they had to fall back on the system's anaemic processor.

PSX Doom is neat and one of the best ports, but oddly enough I find I prefer the Jaguar set of maps more despite their cutbacks, or rather the Ultimate Doom portion of the disc to Doom II. The latter just isn't as interesting or different enough to me to be memorable. PSX Final Doom less so, which really could've freed up a lot of space if they replaced those 13 Master Levels with more Plutonia and TNT. The new STATBAR and SSG is nifty though.

Nowadays I don't particularly care to play the original PSX version after having gone through it again on emulation (I used to own it physically) due to the really bad frame rates in some levels.

50 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

PSX Doom is neat and one of the best ports, but oddly enough I find I prefer the Jaguar set of maps more despite their cutbacks, or rather the Ultimate Doom portion of the disc to Doom II. The latter just isn't as interesting or different enough to me to be memorable. PSX Final Doom less so, which really could've freed up a lot of space if they replaced those 13 Master Levels with more Plutonia and TNT. The new STATBAR and SSG is nifty though.

Nowadays I don't particularly care to play the original PSX version after having gone through it again on emulation (I used to own it physically) due to the really bad frame rates in some levels.

There's always the newly released GEC GZDoom port here you can play and not have to worry about the framerate anymore.

1 hour ago, Impboy4 said:

There's always the newly released GEC GZDoom port here you can play and not have to worry about the framerate anymore.

There's also overclocking the emulated CPU in emulators like RetroArch so that the framerate gets increased. Double it up and damn near all of it will run at 30 FPS - if it don't, you can nudge it up a bit more. Won't hurt anything, after all; it's an emulator, and the game has both framerate and logic rate caps built-in.

(And the Master Levels project for if you'd like to play those "missing" levels, as well. I hope my maps kill you if you do. :) )