Strange/Obscure/Interesting versions of Doom

We know of all the official versions of Doom on different systems. We also know that source ports exist for many systems, like the DS, PSP, GP32. What about versions of Doom that seem hard to pull off, yet bring in attention anyway?

(EDIT)Intellivsion Doom I saw a web page about 5 years ago where someone offered a ROM of what he claims is Doom on Intellivision. Back then, I was no good with emulators, let alone many programs, so I couldn't check it out. I haven't found that page since. Now, I searched the forum and realized why I had no results before. I searched colecovision, but then searched intellivision. It turns out that this is a April Fools joke.

Doom on Sega Genesis It looked interesting, but then one would know that it's too good to be true. It was just a hoax.

Atari 2600 Doom This is one of the more famous (if not the most famous) hoax. Although he did explain how he pulled it off, I'm still fascinated by the procedure.

Doom on game.com
That old Tiger Handheld? I vaguely recall seeing an image (or video) of some sort of Doom on game.com It's a small possibility that I'm mixing up the Duke Nukem 3D version, but I have a strong feeling I remember.

ItplaysDoom This site was pretty amusing, where they showed Doom ported on so many mini handheld devices, like phones, music devices, cameras, refridgerator (WHAT) and calculators. The site went down, I believe.

Ticalc.org The calculator program place. You can still find some interesting "recreations" of Doom. They're mostly Wolfenstein clones, but it's interesting to see the Doom theme carried out in any case.

ZX Spectrum Doom/Doom II I saw screenshots and have tried a couple of the versions. They're like Wolfenstein, but still interesting. I didn't play long, though, since the control was too awkward.

Do you guys know of others?

EDIT: Oh, yes, I forgot to mention one:

NES Doom Someone on youtube posted a couple of videos of his "recreation" of Doom on the NES. It's what anyone would expect, really. But there was an imp, a barrel and the player holding the pistol in a plain purple room. It reminds me of those old flight simulators with 4 direction turning.

Again, it seems I might have come across the YTMND page showing the Doom on game.com and memory degrading made me believe I saw a genuine one.

C64: M.o.o.d.
Watch it in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Oqz5WjDPI
Download it here: http://noname.c64.org/mood/
It's more like a techdemo than a game, and it's also more like a Wolf3d engine than Doom. But still, it actually has textures and a pretty impressive framerate for 64 kb RAM, 1 mhz CPU, 16 colors.

Most of these are obvious jokes/trolling since the systems are far too underpowered to run Doom. The only reason the SNES works is due to the 20MHz Super FX chip in the cartridge.

Edit: Also slapping the name Doom on a crappy raycaster does not make it Doom.

I remember seeing a website a while back that was called something like "Will It Play Doom?" and it had a pretty sizeable list of different machines that had some kind of homebrew of Doom, or were modded to play Doom. It was pretty neat, but I can't seem to find it any longer.

Also, while just googling for it I came across this article that is pretty hilarious but unrelated: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/101526

Many of these "Dooms" are also testing the limit of what may be defined as "doom".

Sometimes this seems to be as low as slapping the name "Doom" over a generic Maze War like engine, with the final result looking like either Maze War or Wolf 3D, if it actually had 3D turning (the Doom RPG would fall somewhere halfway).

Some low-end versions have interesting lo-fi full-fledged engines (within reasonable limits), and most of the other extra-low-end versions are hoaxes. Needless to say, none of these recreations uses the original IWAD data or any piece of the source code (some were made before it was made public)

Today we would only consider "true" source ports those that are based entirely or partially on the original source code, at least for what regards the gameplay and ability to use the original IWAD data.

Despite this "Doom runs on everything" hype, there have still been no successful and complete Java ports of Doom (JavaDoom and Stark aren't either), for mobiles or desktops. Having attempted to start one myself, I can understand why: too many C-ism to port the code closely, in fact most of the effort would go into eliminating C conventions, countless #ifdefs, abuse of enum cardinality etc. so a complete rewrite from scratch would be more plausible.

i have a zx spectrum emulator on my pc. i found a rom of spectrum doom, and tried it.

all it showed was a HUGE border with a stone wall and skeleton, with the big text at the top of it saying "DOOM", but not even using the doom logo's font, i believe it was just "bubble-writing". also at the bottom, the border showed the black bar saying "demo version", obviously showing this was supposed to just be the shareware doom.
on the actual game screen i saw the fist as the weapon and what looked like that acid pit with the elevator in the hole in E1M3, horribly drawn and completely white. i tried every button and all i could get the game to do was make the fist punch. i couldnt move. i didnt see any monsters or anything. i dont know if i did something wrong, but if i wasnt, that wasnt a port, that was a slightly moving picture.

There are actually more than one Spectrum ZX "Doom ports", which look nothing alike. The white one with the "DEMO" logo you describe is the first I stumbled upon, and that was way back in 1996, again on a spectrum emulator (Z80 on a 486 :-p ).

I recall it was controlled via QAOP keys, like most spectrum games. There's nowhere to go really, it's just one large rectangular hallway with statically drawn textures. You can't really say you're moving until you reach close to the wall on the other side. No monsters either, but it has a cool AY tune if you have a Spectrum Plus.

The "final" ZX spectrum by Digital Reality looked nothing like it, though. It was mostly black & color, had monsters etc.

Needless to say, both were made before the source code was made public and use nothing of the original IWAD data.

Here is a pre-release version of the "colorful one":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW_XDSFdn-4

and its "complete" version running on a real speccy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v7cFGneuaw

I still am not sure if the "white demo" one is in any way related to these ones.

Doom on the Tiger Handheld

This is somewhat related, but someone wrote a Doom engine in Visual Basic 4 that could play Doom wads. A lot of things weren't functional but the renderer was intact and you could move around the maps. I wish I could have understood the significance of it when I played around with it so many years ago, because pulling off something like that in VB is quite the feat. Now I can't remember what it was called or where I even got it.

EarthQuake said:

This is somewhat related, but someone wrote a Doom engine in Visual Basic 4 that could play Doom wads. A lot of things weren't functional but the renderer was intact and you could move around the maps.

This sounds like the exact description of the Stark project (in Java). It also loaded maps and you could move around, even see monsters and sprites but not actually play it.

It used to be hosted here: http://www.theintraclinic.com/stark/ but the link is apparently dead.

Correction on my previous post: the only other "Doom Java port" is actually called DoomCott, and is pretty much the opposite of Stark: it can display the startup screen and menu, but has no renderer and only displays a 2D map (unknown with what level of functionality).

Considering how long this has been around, it would be reasonable to call Java Doom a lost proposition, by now.

Alternatively, there are indeed certain 3D Engines "written in Visual Basic". I used the quotes because those projects usually turn out to be game-maker like, prepackaged 3D engines in the form of an external DLL to which any language can link to, and which you can customize externally. For example, the infamous game Ethnic Cleaning is just that: a VB codebase controlling the Genesis 3D engine (which is written in C/C++ however).

There were some other examples like shockwave flash "Doom versions" that also used an external 3D engine to load doom-like maps, but these "cheat" in the sense that they don't actually port Doom's code (and usually they don't implement the gameplay as such).

Actually, I have seen, I believe, over 20 different ZX Spectrum image files claiming to be a Doom creation. Only a few of these had screenshots and only a few of these do I remember, otherwise I'd have more to mention about them.

LogicDeLuxe said:

C64: M.o.o.d.
Watch it in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Oqz5WjDPI

That weird background sound is mesmerizing...

Maes said:

Here is a pre-release version of the "colorful one":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW_XDSFdn-4

and its "complete" version running on a real speccy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v7cFGneuaw

That is one kick-ass soundtrack.

Here's a video of an engine with Doom graphics on some Russian Spectrum clone called a "SPRINTER 2000":

J-selva said:

Doom on Sega Genesis It looked interesting, but then one would know that it's too good to be true. It was just a hoax.

32X Doom :P

Super Jamie said:

SPRINTER 2000 video

WTF @ Second Reality Skaven soundtrack ...

The Sprinter 2000 is however more of a massive extension of the Spectrum, than a clone. Let's say it is to a Spectrum what a Pentium-class machine would be an original IBM-PC :-p

About the "Genesis version"...I was kinda saddened that it turned out to be a hoax :-/ I believe that if a serious attempt was made, it would be more or less on par with the Alien Breed games when ran on an Amiga 500. Unremarkable perhaps, but doable. After all, there is an official and real "Duke Nukem 3D" for the genesis. It looks more like Corridor 7 but heh, draw your own conclusions.

Speaking of console variations and extensions, did you know the Genesis (aka Mega Drive) is still for sale new in Brazil?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variations_of_the_Sega_Mega_Drive

I knew that there were dubiously licensed clones made (pity I didn't buy one a few years ago, they were dirt cheap and had even a selection of good games, including Sonic. Beats your average famiclone any day!).

But officially...heh. Isn't SEGA also selling it with a fixed selection of games in a standalone "controller TV Game" form (with no cartridge)?

I believe Tec Toy have the SEGA license in Brazil, so their Mega Drive 4 and Handheld are ostensibly "official" consoles. I think it's pretty rad that there's a nation of 200 million retro gamers out there :)

I've seen such "controller TV game" things for sale here too, though I didn't look closer to see if they were licensed or not. I remember seeing a webpage where a dude got one for either Genesis or NES games and soldered a cartridge slot onto it. Apparently it played games as per a normal console.

Super Jamie said:

32X Doom :P

Well, yes, actually, but that's the 32X expansion onto the Genesis. Imagine Doom on the Genesis alone :) But I'm not familiar with the specs of either the Genesis or SNES, so I'm not sure if the result would have been about the same on both.

J-selva said:

But I'm not familiar with the specs of either the Genesis or SNES, so I'm not sure if the result would have been about the same on both.

The Genesis has a better and faster CPU then the SNES. Still both consoles on their own aren't really capable of frame-buffered graphics, the CPUs where meant to just handle the game logic. Nintendo was smart enough though to add extra pins for memory mappers and co-processors. That's why the SNES version needs the Super FX chip and Sega had to come up with the 32X to compensate.

Thanks for the info.

I once played an unlicensed gba game called Dhume. It was surprisingly an FPS. There really wasn't much of a connection to Doom, but they clearly based it off Doom slightly. The Doom logo has the same font, color and everything. You get a pistol and Shotgun-like weapon. I also picked up a Chainsaw, which gave the message "You found meat!" or something with funny Engrish. There is a mug which is the player helmet. It cracks as your health depletes.

Besides these, there's nothing else Doom. The enemies go from bats and giant snakes to hovering bee robot things. The setting is unimaginative. You have a lifebar and lives instead of armor. I never made it very far, but the 4 levels I played had an end boss in a closed room. No key hunt and there's a lot of platforming involved, with jumping.

Weird game, really. Can you believe this game came with an instruction manual and box package?

Maes said:

After all, there is an official and real "Duke Nukem 3D" for the genesis. It looks more like Corridor 7 but heh, draw your own conclusions.

I have that at home. In comparsion with the other Genesis FPSs, this one have a really big screen and big sprites. Technically its impressive, but i did not want to play through the whole game.

LogicDeLuxe said:

C64: M.o.o.d.
Watch it in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Oqz5WjDPI
Download it here: http://noname.c64.org/mood/
It's more like a techdemo than a game, and it's also more like a Wolf3d engine than Doom. But still, it actually has textures and a pretty impressive framerate for 64 kb RAM, 1 mhz CPU, 16 colors.

heh, CyClones textures.

http://spatula-city.org/~im14u2c/intv/doom/

there's the link for intellivision doom oh my eyes it burns

a video of zx spectrum doom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW_XDSFdn-4

Thorgrim103 said:

http://spatula-city.org/~im14u2c/intv/doom/

Doom in 64 kilobytes. I'm officially impressed.

Really?

Site

Note: This was an April Fool's Joke.

NOOOOOOOOOO.

I was looking for an emulator too, so I could play it. :(

Heh, but Intellivision did have a maze-shooter with cybernetic opponents, spiders, flying things and weapon pick-ups :p