Font related discoveries for the Sega 32X, Atari Jaguar, 3DO and DOS Doom

[Polonium]

Thought i'd post some of the stuff that i noticed while remaking the "Doom font" for version 1.5 of Doom 32X Resurrection.

The font that is used in the original DOS Doom, Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom contains dozens of mistakes. Here's one of them:






... Yep, Doom is officially ruined. 0/10. Time to shut down the forum!

And there's way more font mistakes, including the different fonts for the Sega 32X and Atari Jaguar ports. There's so many that i can't remember them all, but highlighted below are most of the mistakes:



Several Jaguar letters that are not shown here are also narrower (like the letter K, which i've only included above as an example), but this was probably done on purpose to either save ROM space or for performance reasons, which is why i didn't include them all. And if you're wondering why the Jaguar font is even here when what i was doing is related to the 32X, it's because up until D32XR v1.4 it was using this font so i'm familiar with it. The 3DO port also uses the Jag font with the same errors.

The font used for the 32X port is an absolute mess. But the colours are also so awful that it looks like something you'd see from a standard Mega Drive game (limited to 64 on-screen colours) instead of something running on a 32X, which typically displays up to 256 on-screen colours (it can technically do more on-screen colours but i'm not aware of any games that do this). And for some reason the Doom 32X WAD does not contain any font characters, so they must be stored elsewhere inside the ROM.

And have you ever noticed that the exclamation mark at the end of "Nightmare!" contains a skull?



For comparison, here's the standard exclamation mark:    

By the way i've no idea if these font errors have been mentioned on this forum before, but i'm new here and couldn't find any similar posts.

[Dark Pulse]

My guess is that probably it was just converted and slapped in. Carmack didn't really have tons of time to work on the ports, especially Jaguar/32X.

[Eurisko]

Well,that's it then. Fuck Doom

[Oday]

This is helarious.

[Mr.Rocket]

It's it suppose to be an exclamation point, instead of an exclamation mark? :P

[ChillyWilly]

On 12/19/2021 at 5:47 PM, Polonium said:

The font used for the 32X port is an absolute mess. But the colours are also so awful that it looks like something you'd see from a standard Mega Drive game (limited to 64 on-screen colours) instead of something running on a 32X, which typically displays up to 256 on-screen colours (it can technically do more on-screen colours but i'm not aware of any games that do this). And for some reason the Doom 32X WAD does not contain any font characters, so they must be stored elsewhere inside the ROM.

 

The original 32X Doom put overlays (like the title and menus) and the status bar on the MD side, so lumps dealing with all that were pulled from the wad, converted to 15/30 colors, and stuffed into the rom where the MD side could access it. Certain sounds are also not in the wad - namely the menu sounds. While it seems like using the MD side like this would make the game faster, Vic and I found that MD VDP traffic causes bus contention and slows the game... in fact, more than if you just keep the overlays and status bar on the 32X side. Which is one reason why D32XR has all that back in the 256 color display. It wasn't just to make it look proper, but it also makes the game faster.

[Vic]

39 minutes ago, ChillyWilly said:

While it seems like using the MD side like this would make the game faster, Vic and I found that MD VDP traffic causes bus contention and slows the game... in fact, more than if you just keep the overlays and status bar on the 32X side. Which is one reason why D32XR has all that back in the 256 color display. It wasn't just to make it look proper, but it also makes the game faster.

But for the most part it was due to the fact that I can't write a single line of code for MD's VDP :D

[ChillyWilly]

13 hours ago, Vic said:

But for the most part it was due to the fact that I can't write a single line of code for MD's VDP :D

 

Well, that's just serendipity. :D

 

But yes, we didn't realize using the MD side VDP slowed things down until we tried using it for a debug overlay.

[ludicrous_peridot]

I played around with Saturn fonts, by the way and these are also way too terrible!

Note that letter E in the second row using wrong color for the outer shadow outline.

And that's, what, the most frequent vowel in the English language?

Certainly these devs had no respect for anything.  See for yourself:

 

 

Yet they seem to be new, don't they?

In never occurred to me someone will be fixing this though - I though that would just ruin the memories, people have!

 

 

The Nightmare skull, by the way - I personally only noticed it like couple of months ago for the first time...

[ludicrous_peridot]

To add to this - PSX had some obvious font issues as well...

 

Note w of the small 8x8 font:

and how the big font J bleeds into I on the sprite sheet, and medium s has an unnecessary gap.

 

On 12/20/2021 at 1:47 AM, Polonium said:

And for some reason the Doom 32X WAD does not contain any font characters, so they must be stored elsewhere inside the ROM.

 

Appreciate these are not on the wad, but you got them somehow to work on, right? Would it be possible for the original glyphs to be shared in some way?

[Vic]

1 hour ago, ludicrous_peridot said:

Appreciate these are not on the wad, but you got them somehow to work on, right?

Nope.

[Polonium]

3 hours ago, ludicrous_peridot said:

Appreciate these are not on the wad, but you got them somehow to work on, right? Would it be possible for the original glyphs to be shared in some way?

I didn't need the 32X font, thank fuck. It's an unusable mess. Instead i used the DOS Doom font as a reference and redrew it to better work with the 32X and CRT TV's. Here's the new font and more details.

For the image in my first post i just cut out the 32X font from screenshots, taken via emulation. It would be time consuming but you could rip the entire 32X font this way - Take screenshots of all the screens with text and resize them to 320x224 (the games resolution) using nearest neighbour scaling in something like Photoshop. Just make sure that any kind of aspect ratio correction isn't enabled in the emulator (like 4:3). You'll then get a 1:1 pixel perfect match, ready to be cut out. I doubt the 32X port contains every letter though, and it's the same for all the original DOS Dooms, which store entire words as graphics. For example, all the words in Doom don't contain a large X so there's no large X anywhere in the game or WAD. Looks like 32X Doom is similar.

 

On 12/24/2021 at 2:59 PM, ludicrous_peridot said:

I played around with Saturn fonts, by the way and these are also way too terrible!

Lol yeah just like the port... I bought that shit on release and it's still one of the worst games i've ever paid for. Saturn uses the same two Hitachi SH-2 CPU's as the 32X as well, but clocked 25% higher at 28.6MHz, then you also have the extra VDP1 and VDP2 accelerator chips, CD media, and tons more RAM which can be further extended via RAM carts. So if you look at how great D32XR runs in the latest update on 32X hardware, locked at 30fps 99% of the time, now imagine what the Saturn could have done with an actual good port...
 

 

On 12/23/2021 at 1:03 AM, Mr.Rocket said:

It's it suppose to be an exclamation point, instead of an exclamation mark? :P

That's "American English". In real English it's called an exclamation mark :p

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, Polonium said:

Lol yeah just like the port... I bought that shit on release and it's still one of the worst games i've ever paid for. Saturn uses the same two Hitachi SH-2 CPU's as the 32X as well, but clocked 25% higher at 28.6MHz, then you also have the extra VDP1 and VDP2 accelerator chips, CD media, and tons more RAM which can be further extended via RAM carts. So if you look at how great D32XR runs in the latest update on 32X hardware, locked at 30fps 99% of the time, now imagine what the Saturn could have done with an actual good port...

Pretty sure you know the story about how Jim Bagley had a 60 FPS renderer going but Carmack nixed it due to affine texture swim. So it's definitely possible.

 

Of course, they've also got the deadline of "this game must be ready for mastering by this date" and not infinite time to optimize for the hardware, either. :P

[ChillyWilly]

4 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Of course, they've also got the deadline of "this game must be ready for mastering by this date" and not infinite time to optimize for the hardware, either. :P

 

All the "worst" conversions were primarily due to time constraints because the company wanted to ship in an unrealistic amount of time. Look at the 3DO version for the very worst example of no-time-to-make-a-good-conversion. It's the bane of programmers everywhere.

[Vic]

10 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

not infinite time to optimize for the hardware, either. :P

Hey, it's not like anyone here has infinite time for anything :P Much less so for a hobby project.

[Dimon12321]

8 hours ago, Vic said:

Hey, it's not like anyone here has infinite time for anything :P Much less so for a hobby project.

For a hobby project it was great to even launch the Jaguar game, let alone improve it this far. By my own little experience of working with microcontrollers I can say that the knowledge of hardware subtleties is sometimes even harder than code writing.

[Polonium]

On 12/23/2021 at 10:40 AM, ChillyWilly said:

 

The original 32X Doom put overlays (like the title and menus) and the status bar on the MD side, so lumps dealing with all that were pulled from the wad, converted to 15/30 colors, and stuffed into the rom where the MD side could access it.

Hmm this must be why Doomguy looks high:



So it was just the limited Mega Drive colours all along :/


.... Or was it?

[Dark Pulse]

5 hours ago, Polonium said:

Hmm this must be why Doomguy looks high:



So it was just the limited Mega Drive colours all along :/


.... Or was it?

Joke aside, yeah, definitely why. You're limited to 64 colors total, after all (four sets of 16), and that has to be shared by everything rendered with the palette. :P

 

Theoretically you could change the palette, but that's tough to do without artifacts.

[ChillyWilly]

21 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

You're limited to 64 colors total, after all (four sets of 16)

 

Four sets of 15, with three 0 indices that are transparent, and one 0 index that serves as the background color. You can select which of the four zero index color entries is the background; the other three are transparent no matter their color. So in general, 60 colors and the background color.

 

[Blast_Brothers]

The limitations of the Genesis don't change the fact that, at the least, the eyes should've used the color employed for the highlights on Doomguy's skin:

 

 

Rushed game is rushed, I guess.