SNES Doom Limited Run Collector's Edition ANNOUNCED

[Dark Pulse]

On 8/13/2024 at 2:54 PM, Hurykles said:

sorry for all that. I just never understood what's so special about snes doom other than it running on snes.

*shrugs*

I guess i am too young to understand

 

It's hard to explain if you weren't there at the time, but it's basically "The SNES should not have been able to run the game."

 

3D gaming was just starting to hit home consoles at the time. I vividly remember Starfox coming out. I remember it blowing me away and playing it for hours upon hours. 3D games were around, of course - they'd been occasionally in arcades (Battlezone is considered the first in 1980), and PCs were obviously starting to be able to do it and would fully make the leap with titles like Quake the year after SNES Doom came out; PO'ed (yes, the same game NightDive recently remastered) hit the 3DO in November 1995, just a few months after SNES Doom. But my family couldn't afford a computer then, and I certainly didn't have the money to go to an arcade. On the other hand, I was able to beg my father for $30 to buy the SNES version of Doom. (Well, really $27, but the guy selling it let it go for three less dollars.)

 

For comparison, here's two FPS games that came out on the SNES before Doom: Faceball 2000 and Wolfenstein 3D.

 

 

In this game's case, the compromise is obviously being reduced to a very tiny rendering window to get the framerate up. Also no textures of any kind on walls or floors. Levels are incredibly small and designed to minimize how much is rendered at one time. Things very noticeably bog down with long view distances or a lot of enemies in view at once.

 

Now let's look at Wolf3D, which was ported by id Software themselves.

 

 

The framerate is faster and fills the view more, but the tradeoffs are obvious here too - the game looks EXTREMELY chunky. The technical details are a bit complex (though if you'd really like to go in-depth, this video covers it all), but essentially it required reworking how the engine was rendered (Classic Wolf used Raycasting, SNES Wolf used BSP trees in a manner not unlike Doom), but it would only play well with rendering at an abysmal resolution of 112x96 pixels. Mode 7 was then used to stretch this to 224x192.

 

SNES Doom leverages the SuperFX 2 to bypass all of this. It's rendered in actual 3D, and while it uses tricks of its own, the framerate hovered around 10 FPS. The remaster will do a good bit better on this regard; it aims for 20 FPS (it can't go higher due to limits on the SNES side), and from what Randy's told us (and the public now), it hits that a good chunk of the time.

 

10 hours ago, Havok said:

And I don't know why they can't put "Super Nintendo" on the box, I know they might have to pay a licensing fee but so be it. 

Legal reasons. Nintendo could sue for using their trademarked terms without permission, not to mention they may not approve anyway, and even if they did, paying likely tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars just for two words is basically not worth it for a small-run product.

 

It's why you don't see any SNES iconography or anything of the sort on the box either, just non-copyrightable things like general graphical design and so forth.

 

If you've got that kind of money and are willing to finance the cost, though, by all means, let us know!

[Roebloz]

Here's my announcement video about it (Took me a while to get to doing it I know) and I basically go over how I got to work on this and what I've done. You also get an exclusive look at my E4M9 port! (Though in the old engine via Mopoz's tools, and some detail I removed for that version was later re-added by Cacodemontube, so now's a good time for the "Nothing is final and is subject to change" disclaimer!)

Oh yeah...I'm a VTuber now, did I forget to tell you?

[Lost_Soul]

Okay, for sake of contributing to the discussion about the specs, what of the SNES version's distance bug where visible enemies far away from the player don't move or react to the player's presence? Does the BFG still behave like the plasma rifle without the big explosive ripple wave seen on the PC? Have all of the hell textures from the PC version been brought to the SNES for the later episodes?

[Dark Pulse]

On 8/21/2024 at 7:39 PM, Lost_Soul said:

Okay, for sake of contributing to the discussion about the specs, what of the SNES version's distance bug where visible enemies far away from the player don't move or react to the player's presence? Does the BFG still behave like the plasma rifle without the big explosive ripple wave seen on the PC? Have all of the hell textures from the PC version been brought to the SNES for the later episodes?

As far as I know, all of that stuff is unaltered. I definitely know we didn't have the room for all the textures, so some might be different or replaced - we figured getting the maps in was a little more important than getting the textures in.

[Lost_Soul]

4 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

As far as I know, all of that stuff is unaltered. I definitely know we didn't have the room for all the textures, so some might be different or replaced - we figured getting the maps in was a little more important than getting the textures in.

 

Understandable. It would have been cool to see SNES DOOM perform on a level similar to the Sega 32X but alas, I guess that the technical constraints are simply too much for the hardware to handle.

[Dark Pulse]

42 minutes ago, Lost_Soul said:

Understandable. It would have been cool to see SNES DOOM perform on a level similar to the Sega 32X but alas, I guess that the technical constraints are simply too much for the hardware to handle.

Well, it's also we want to preserve the feeling of "Runs on SNES" rather than just cheap out and have an ARM core emulate the PC version.

 

Anyway, I did ask Randy about this, and he confirmed what I figured is indeed the case and unchanged from the original - remember, while we do have more capacity, it's still only an extra megabyte for the data the SuperFX needs, so there's still not tons of room for things like rotation and stuff. Maybe if we get the chance to do more, we can do something about this. :)

 

Though that "distance bug" is much more likely to be a performance optimization so that monsters aren't sucking up processing cycles from incredibly far away (as well as so that you're not getting attacked by a one-pixel splotch). Randy thinks this is the case, but he can't definitively confirm that is what he was thinking at the time he wrote the code.

[Contmotore]

I'm hyped for the remastered version!

 

I always wanted a SNES back in the day, but never got one... So I finally decided to buy a SNES, after 3 decades. I also bought the original Doom for it. Maybe not the best Doom experience, especially when it comes to circle strafing, but still it's a nice collector's item.

 

I wonder how much the remastered version will cost for the collectors edition. But I'm happy with the standard version too!