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Max Cady

DoomED on NeXTstep 3.0

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Hi guys!

 

John Romero wrote a informative text about the production of Doom at the time. He said that DoomED was on NeXTstep 3.3.

I wrote to John Romero that DoomED coudln't be on Nextstep 3.3 cause it came out in 1995. 

It's important to me cause I want to make a visual video montage about the production of Doom on a nextstep and I need the boot sequence on that specific OS.

 

John Romero himself answered me and corrected me. Here it's his answer in the attach file:

 

 

Image 1.png

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Well, I'm pretty sure it runs on 3.3... I mean, they did develop Doom on the thing for some four years, so that'd be 1992-1996.

 

And again, I got a VMDK with NextStep 3.3 and DoomEd running on it, so it's safe to say it will run on 3.3.

 

He's probably just remembering a version he spent a lot of time working under. I mean, 20-25 years ago is more than enough time for memories to get fuzzy. 

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15 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Well, I'm pretty sure it runs on 3.3... I mean, they did develop Doom on the thing for some four years, so that'd be 1992-1996.

 

And again, I got a VMDK with NextStep 3.3 and DoomEd running on it, so it's safe to say it will run on 3.3.

 

He's probably just remembering a version he spent a lot of time working under. I mean, 20-25 years ago is more than enough time for memories to get fuzzy. 

You are completely right. But the real question was: What Nextstep version when they were making Doom 1? 

My guess is that they upgraded Nextstep version afterward. 

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3 hours ago, bipolarmaximus said:

You are completely right. But the real question was: What Nextstep version when they were making Doom 1? 

My guess is that they upgraded Nextstep version afterward. 

That, we can safely infer.

 

The Doom 0.2 Alpha was made in February 1993, and only two months of work had been done on the game and engine at that point, so that means Doom's development began about a year before its first public release - December 1992. (Carmack had no doubt been doing some extra research/test work before this, but much of that was done alongside the Shadowcaster engine, an engine that's approximately halfway between Wolf and Doom in terms of complexity).

 

NeXTSTEP 3.0 came out in September of 1992, with 3.1 out in May 1993, 3.2 in October 1993, and 3.3 in February 1995. The latest Doom Alpha we have (not counting the near-finished Press Release Beta) is 0.5, on May 22, 1993.

 

So basically, the first half of Doom's development was easily done on 3.0. Much of the later development (which sadly we don't have any record of) would have been done on 3.1, and the last touches of Doom 1 would've been done under 3.2. Naturally, all Doom II development would also have been done under 3.2.

 

Ultimate Doom may have been where things leapt to 3.3, as that came out in April 1995. This is probably why Romero said 3.3 earlier - because the last vestiges of Doom, in terms of official, developer-supported content (i.e; not stuff like NRFTL or ports), came with that version of the game and the engine. Final Doom doesn't count at all as those were built by the community, so they were using your usual array of DOS (or perhaps Win3.1/Win95) editors, and nothing about them likely touched a NeXT Cube at all except at id's offices.

 

So basically, most of Doom and Doom II's development was done under NeXTSTEP 3.1 and 3.2, with early lifecycle stuff under 3.0 and very late lifecycle stuff under 3.3.

 

While we can't ever be sure this is what they did, id was obviously going for the latest and greatest in hardware at the time, so I fail to see any reason why they wouldn't have updated the OS to the newest and shiniest version reasonably quickly after it came out.

 

Though if Romero is floating around and feels like being an authoritative source of confirmation, that always works, too. :P

Edited by Dark Pulse

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5 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

That, we can safely infer.

 

The Doom 0.2 Alpha was made in February 1993, and only two months of work had been done on the game and engine at that point, so that means Doom's development began about a year before its first public release - December 1992. (Carmack had no doubt been doing some extra research/test work before this, but much of that was done alongside the Shadowcaster engine, an engine that's approximately halfway between Wolf and Doom in terms of complexity).

 

NeXTSTEP 3.0 came out in September of 1992, with 3.1 out in May 1993, 3.2 in October 1993, and 3.3 in February 1995. The latest Doom Alpha we have (not counting the near-finished Press Release Beta) is 0.5, on May 22, 1993.

 

So basically, the first half of Doom's development was easily done on 3.0. Much of the later development (which sadly we don't have any record of) would have been done on 3.1, and the last touches of Doom 1 would've been done under 3.2. Naturally, all Doom II development would also have been done under 3.2.

 

Ultimate Doom may have been where things leapt to 3.3, as that came out in April 1995. This is probably why Romero said 3.3 earlier - because the last vestiges of Doom, in terms of official, developer-supported content (i.e; not stuff like NRFTL or ports), came with that version of the game and the engine. Final Doom doesn't count at all as those were built by the community, so they were using your usual array of DOS (or perhaps Win3.1/Win95) editors, and nothing about them likely touched a NeXT Cube at all except at id's offices.

 

So basically, most of Doom and Doom II's development was done under NeXTSTEP 3.1 and 3.2, with early lifecycle stuff under 3.0 and very late lifecycle stuff under 3.3.

 

While we can't ever be sure this is what they did, id was obviously going for the latest and greatest in hardware at the time, so I fail to see any reason why they wouldn't have updated the OS to the newest and shiniest version reasonably quickly after it came out.

 

Though if Romero is floating around and feels like being an authoritative source of confirmation, that always works, too. :P

Thank you for those precision! Very interesting. At what date Romero worked on Doomed? I will trace it back for the nextstep version. Knowing that will allow me to make a simulation of the boot.

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52 minutes ago, bipolarmaximus said:

Thank you for those precision! Very interesting. At what date Romero worked on Doomed? I will trace it back for the nextstep version. Knowing that will allow me to make a simulation of the boot.

It would've been during and alongside development of the game.

 

We have no idea of the specific dates, but basically Carmack did the engine and some of the heavier code, while Romero did the tools and some other code in the main engine.

 

It's pretty safe to say you could use NeXTSTEP 3.0 for that, since that's what Romero himself corrected it to.

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ho yessss baby!

Do you think doomed was ever been on a nextcube with Romero working on it before working on the white computer we see that we can't identify?

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1 hour ago, bipolarmaximus said:

ho yessss baby!

Do you think doomed was ever been on a nextcube with Romero working on it before working on the white computer we see that we can't identify?

It would've had to be. DoomEd and Doom itself were developed on NeXT hardware.

 

That white computer is some kind of Intel machine since it clearly has an "intel inside" badge on it. As I said elsewhere, I'm pretty sure it's a DOS PC, since NeXTSTEP didn't run on i386 hardware until 3.1 (which came out in May 1993), and that would've been well into Doom's development.

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