Was SNES Doom really THAT bad?

I've owned an SNES for many years but I've never been able to find a copy of DOOM for it. I've noticed how everybody talks about how it's the worst port ever, but I've seen videos of people playing it and honestly it doesn't look that bad.

Need to make an snesdoom.wad. Itll replace all flats with solid grey texture and replace all sprite rotations with front frame. Not sure how to make a pwad force 20-25 fps.

SNES Doom's maps are most like the PC version and it includes Nightmare mode, so that is quite a challenge, as you would never run out of enemies. Give it a go you will love it, and unlike 32X Doom it actually has good music.

I played it on an emulator and thought it was cool - although, if you have a PC or a better console, there's not much reason to play SNES doom except for the novelty


On the other hand, NES Wolfenstein 3d was way better than the PC version :D

It's kinda hard to gauge the quality of SNES Doom.
On one hand, squeezing Doom onto a 3.58 mhz processor is pretty impressive and the level design was, at the time, the closest to their PC counterparts.
On the other hand, there's quite a few problems, like sticky walls, having to select higher difficulties to pick the other episodes, really low resolution, multiplayer was practically non-existent, no circle strafing... Yeah.

Catoptromancy said:

Need to make an snesdoom.wad. Itll replace all flats with solid grey texture and replace all sprite rotations with front frame. Not sure how to make a pwad force 20-25 fps.

I guess I'll point you to these facts I figured out about monster behavior in SNES Doom.

As for SNES Doom, I liked it. But if you know how to import games, I'd suggest you check out the Japanese version, which allows you to play any episode on any difficulty level, something the US and Euro versions didn't let you do.

The PAL version is the worst, unfortunatley it's the one I have. at least the NTSC version had the awesome orange cartridge, the PAL dosen't even have that!

I enjoyed it. It was the first Doom experience I've had. The scariest, too. Though I was rather young then and the TV's brightness was dying, so I couldn't see but 10-15 feet in front of me.

Ultraboy94 said:

The PAL version is the worst, unfortunatley it's the one I have. at least the NTSC version had the awesome orange cartridge, the PAL dosen't even have that!

All PAL versions of SNES games are bad. DOOM and Super Metroid are probably the worst.

Ultraboy94 said:

...the NTSC version had the awesome orange cartridge

Red cartridge.

footman said:

On one hand, squeezing Doom onto a 3.58 mhz processor is pretty impressive

This helped a lot:

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

Catoptromancy said:

Need to make an snesdoom.wad. Itll replace all flats with solid grey texture and replace all sprite rotations with front frame. Not sure how to make a pwad force 20-25 fps.

We made one years ago! it was a community project, maybe 8 or 9 people contributing, and was put out with almost every new thing that was changed! :) We always did it through rapishare or something of the like, so i dunno where you can get it now, ive been on the lookout for the master files for the final release.. no luck yet.. A new version with some more modern use of a source port would be fun though!

ShaneAmp said:

We made one years ago! it was a community project, maybe 8 or 9 people contributing, and was put out with almost every new thing that was changed! :) We always did it through rapishare or something of the like, so i dunno where you can get it now, ive been on the lookout for the master files for the final release.. no luck yet.. A new version with some more modern use of a source port would be fun though!

Hmm, this is relevant to my interests.

Just semi on-topic, but I ran into one of these carts a couple of years ago. There's this indoor flea market-ish place about an hour from where I live and one of the stores is filled full of old games and records. I stop by there every now and again to see if anything cool is pops up. I noticed one of those red SNES Doom carts in the rare section and I was looking to buy it...except that the guy was asking like 60 bucks for it. I thought that was a bit steep but I haven't looked to see what those things go for these days. Needless to say I didn't buy it :/. Although I wouldn't have bought it because it was a good port (I've heard not so good things about it), I just would have bought it because it was Doom.

Slightly related, Scalliano made a 32X doom TC with maps and single rotations for monsters using a tool by Saxman in this thread (Scalliano's TC is in the last post): http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/49230-doom-32x-wad-converter/

Are there similar tools for the SNES rom? Are the maps drastically different from Vanilla?

From what I remember of the SNES Doom, some of the maps: e1m6, e2m2 5 and 7, and e3m5 were all left out. Probably because the engine could no longer handle those levels.

SNES Doom is a bad joke.

DoomHero85 said:

From what I remember of the SNES Doom, some of the maps: e1m6, e2m2 5 and 7, and e3m5 were all left out. Probably because the engine could no longer handle those levels.

I'd suggest that the total ROM size was probably more of a factor in having some of the levels left out. The engine seems to have the same scalability as the original DOOM, because I firmly believe it still uses a BSP rendering algorithm. For a custom engine, the behavior is remarkably close to the point of emulating many of DOOM's quirks and bugs.

I own it. When I was a kid, it was the only copy of Doom I had for a while. If was fun then, but I don't see much point in playing it now.

DoomHero85 said:

From what I remember of the SNES Doom, some of the maps: e1m6, e2m2 5 and 7, and e3m5 were all left out. Probably because the engine could no longer handle those levels.

Actually not left out, but sort of like "dummied out". There are "levels" assigned to the original E1M6, E2M2, E2M5, etc. But these levels are just a black screen and the game skips them. I don't know why they just didn't remove the levels altogether and make the ones that remained as consecutive.

That's interesting, the areas on the intermissions screens where those levels were are gone in the SNES version too. I think they should have left them in, as those five levels are some of the best.

I think doing the music might be the hardest part of the conversion, if anyone ends up doing that.

But from my experience with the game on the SNES over a decade ago, I LOVED the music renditions, especially E2M3 (E2M2 on SNES), E2M3 (E2M4) and E2M5 (E2M8).

(PC --> SNES):
E1M1 --> E1M1
E1M2 --> E1M2
E1M3 --> E1M3
E1M4 --> E1M4
E1M5 --> E1M5
E1M6 --> E1M6 (black screen; supposed to be Central Processing)
E1M7 --> E1M7
E1M8 --> E1M8
E1M9 --> E1M9

(the numbers are ultimately retained...) It's still there.

Same applies for the other 2 episodes.

Music shouldn't be too hard. From what I remember hearing it's mostly soundfont-ing midis with some low fidelity soundfont (or simulate low fidelity by saving the file at a low sampling rate) and adding some reverb and a couple instrument swaps (e.g. swapping E1M1's guitars with string instruments. Of course, the only way I know to do anything like this requires it to be done as an MP3, WMA, WAV, or OGG file. Or maybe there's some way to rig a MOD file up to use said soundfont samples and do reverb from there, but I haven't the slightest idea on that one.

Xeros612 said:

Or maybe there's some way to rig a MOD file up to use said soundfont samples and do reverb from there, but I haven't the slightest idea on that one.

It's worth noting at this point that ModPlug Tracker can open .sf2 banks to pull instruments from.

Xeros612 said:

Music shouldn't be too hard. From what I remember hearing it's mostly soundfont-ing midis with some low fidelity soundfont (or simulate low fidelity by saving the file at a low sampling rate) and adding some reverb and a couple instrument swaps (e.g. swapping E1M1's guitars with string instruments. Of course, the only way I know to do anything like this requires it to be done as an MP3, WMA, WAV, or OGG file. Or maybe there's some way to rig a MOD file up to use said soundfont samples and do reverb from there, but I haven't the slightest idea on that one.

E1M1 uses horribly sampled guitars, I thought? They sound nothing like String Ensembles.

They sound like (really horribly sampled) strings to me.

Its all just synth isnt it?, ive listened to the samples, the only one that sounds like a guitar is the lead on e1m8, but thats probly just made from a midi.. They may have all been made from a midi, but put in as a sound file and used like a mod..

magicsofa said:

On the other hand, NES Wolfenstein 3d was way better than the PC version :D

Heh, the Angry Video Game Nerd said an interesting story about that in his Bible Games review. I don't remember exactly but as I remember, id Software hated the Wolfenstein 3D NES port (but maybe it were another console port), so id gave the Wolf3D license to a nameless company to make a Wolf3D-based game on the NES. And this game were a part of Bible games.

If you want to listen this story more exactly, find AVGN's Bible Games review

Xeros612 said:

They sound like (really horribly sampled) strings to me.

Eh, whatever it is, I think it sounds cool X] I think it makes the originally fast paced, energetic song a little darker and atmospheric. The beginning of E1M2 I thought was scary as hell (no pun).