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AJOgames

Doom Console Palettes

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Prepare for a long read, everyone.

 

I was wondering if any of the Doom console ports had different palettes, now the only console versions I know have palettes that differ from the original PC palette are the PS1 and Saturn versions, Doom 64 doesn't really count as it is it's own game, rather than a port.

 

I believe the three that come the closest to having the original PC palette is the SNES, 3DO and GBA versions, out of the three mentioned, the 3DO is the most accurate, while the GBA version is the least accurate,(due to the graphics being slightly brightened to accommodate for the non backlit screen of the original GBA, the GBA SP, which had a backlit screen, would be released a few years later after Doom GBA was released) SNES is between the two. 

 

the only color differences I see when comparing the SNES graphics and the original PC palettes is that blacks look a lot more like dark grey, and reds look a bit different as well, otherwise,  I think it is very close, if not completely accurate to the 3DO palette, which that version is already very close to the original PC version's palette, 

 

When it comes to the Jaguar and 32X versions, I rather like the grittier look of these ports, though must of that could be attributed to the reduced amount of textures, resulting in a game with a lot of brown,

 

JagDoom is difficult to discuss when it comes to the palette and whether or not it was changed from the PC version, because the Atari Jaguar console uses its own video format, known as CRY, the main thing with this format, is that there is no perfect white, nor is there perfect black, of course there are many more differences between CRY and RGB, however CRY had better 3D shading effects, resulting in the Jaguar version, when compared to all other official versions of Doom out there, (besides Doom64) it is the one that looks the darkest and grittiest out of all of them, almost to the point that it starts to look like Quake, rather than Doom,

 

Now, to me anyway, the colors for JagDoom have a very slight grey/brown hue to them, a good example is the skin tones, if you look at Doomguy's face on the HUD, you might notice the skintones do look a bit more brown, when compared to the PC version, also, textures with brown/darkbrown coors have a slight grey tint. and the grey color in general looks more darker.

 

But like I said, this could be because of how CRY did things, 

if you want to read up on the CRY format, your best bet it to go here.

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/188164-why-cry/

 

Now, the 32X version does have less colors than the rest, at least I think it does, based on how it looks, now the genesis originally had only 128 colors in its main palette, when the 32X was plugged in on top of the console, it enhanced the Genesis in many ways, one of which was increasing the color palette from 128 to 256, and while that is a very big increase for the system, that doesn't really mean the color palette for Doom is going to be the same, 

 

Going back to skintones, the skin on Doomguy's face in the hud this time around has more of a slight pink or red hue to it, (strangely enough though, his hand lots a bit more normal compared to the hud face,) rather than the slight brown or tan hue like in the Jaguar version, 

if you want to compare, here are screenshots of the SNES, 32X, Jaguar and 3DO versions here.

210077645_Doom3DO(U)!001.png.b252f4437fd2a0322a19c14b13566756.png401360211_Doom32X(E)!001.png.2c84161ac502dec24fd5455d9d0193c3.png207870892_DoomJaguar(U)!001.png.97930d8dd5325f6efef55fce8aed09b3.png

doomsnes.JPG.870304043bfe98ea53d65149dd17d582.JPG

 

Now I created this topic mainly to see if the palettes of these ports were actually changed, or if it is the result of how the consoles themselves displayed the graphics, I know @TheLoneSurvivor had did some ROM hacking for Doom SNES, and he was able to find the graphics and the skybox, using a hex editor called HxD, however he was only able to view the skyboxes clearly, as the rest of the textures apparently had dot over them due to something called RLE, or "Run-Length-Encoding",

 

You can read their topic discussion here.

 

But that is mainly what I am referring to, I've always had an interet in ports of popular games and what had to be changed to better suit whatever computer/handheld/console it was being ported to,  and looking at the graphics and seeing how they were changed (for better or worse) is one of the more fascinating aspects of looking at game ports,

 

Looking at palettes is one of the easier ways of looking at graphical differences between various versions of games, especially for someone like me, who has no ROM hacking/hex editing experience whatsoever,

 

I would have also brought up some of the computer versions of Doom, but this is in the Console Doom Topic forum, so this will focus on the console versions, I might talk about these computer version some other time, but you can discuss the computer versions if you want to,

In fact, I'll just list some of the strange unofficial computer ports below, there might be some versions below, starting with...

 

ADoom and DoomAttack, (both are ports of Doom for the Commodore Amiga, ADoom being more faithful to the original PC game, and DoomAttack being a bit more advanced, adds some extra stuff like jumping)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbBSahI6W9c

 

BadMood (Doom for the Atari ST,

https://gamedev.nokturnal.pl/2016/02/badmood-doom-atari-falcon030-port/

 

Doom for the PC-98, (the PC-98 being a japanese computer made by NEC from the late 80s/early 90s that was sort of like an IBM PC, but wasn't completely compatible with all of that computer's software, this version was actually developed by id Software, with help from NEC themselves.)

Here is a video that someone made showing Doom on the PC-98

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj0-KvV0SC0

 

Doom for the Acorn Archimedes,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXo6BtmuZkc

and finally Doom for the CE2.11/HPC2000 Handheld PC. (nicknamed HPC-Doom)

 

never heard of the HPC version? then go here.

https://archive.org/details/tucows_273277_HPC_Doom

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This is a great vid for seeing the various differences not only in palletts but also gameplay and frame rate etc..... It’s an hour long but very interesting.

 

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The base palette used for the Jaguar version is the same as the PC, but the CRY colors that are looked up using it are naturally and necessarily slightly different, because CRY is a relatively small color space. There's a significant amount of hue distortion, and most of it is in the green direction, as is usually the case with 16-bit color spaces. This is probably what you're seeing creating the noticeably "richer" skin complexion.

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It's hard to believe the Jag and PC versions were around at the same time. The Jag looks almost as good as GZDoom if you take out the green tint.

These are shaders but you can easily see the jump in quality from 8 bit to CRY:

PalCry.gif.a78a9b9e168c382143ff85c7977b6382.gif

 

 

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On 1/6/2019 at 3:02 AM, Quasar said:

The base palette used for the Jaguar version is the same as the PC, but the CRY colors that are looked up using it are naturally and necessarily slightly different, because CRY is a relatively small color space. There's a significant amount of hue distortion, and most of it is in the green direction, as is usually the case with 16-bit color spaces. This is probably what you're seeing creating the noticeably "richer" skin complexion.

Well that definitely explains a lot of things, Same palette, just the video output changes the colors to a greenish hue, thank you for the info!

 

Is it the same way for Saturn Doom and PSXDoom? I compared the two palettes between the PC and Playstation using Slade 3 and I barely see any differences, if there are any.

 

PS.

I did notice, when looking through the Doom Alpha files speciafically 0.2 and 0.4 (again using Slade3) and the color palettes for those are a little different as well, 

Just throwing that out there.

 

 

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Interestingly enough, PSX Final Doom have more palettes than PSX Doom.

I realized that when use VRAM viewer cheat (found by myself) and saw some graphics which have wrong palette in FD VRAM viewer.

Also because of that in FD 3rd sky from Doom2 have slightly orange tone. Different skies uses different palettes also.

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14 hours ago, AJOgames said:

I did notice, when looking through the Doom Alpha files speciafically 0.2 and 0.4 (again using Slade3) and the color palettes for those are a little different as well, 

Just throwing that out there.

Oh wow that's really cool. It was even before they adopted the colour value 'steps of four' series ( 0, 3, 7, 11, ... ) for hardware compatibility's sake. These alpha palettes might actually be closer to id's true intent!

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