PrBoom on the Nintendo 3DS

3D, audio, and multiplayer are the three big things still on the to-do list at the moment, in roughly descending order of priority. Hopefully the more time I have to work on this in the future, that stuff will all get done sooner than later, so we'll see.

3noneTwo said:

It's easy enough, first-time setup is just a bit time-consuming. I've been using the YouTube App method without any issues. http://smealum.github.io/3ds/

It's a shame it can't install a shortcut onto the home screen, though, it'd be nice to not have to have a wifi connection since closing your 3DS with it on just freezes it.

Yeah, Tubehax's wifi necessity can be a bother. There's another method that uses the home menu itself to launch directly into the Homebrew menu, at the expense of being able to (easily) use a custom theme. I haven't tried it yet, but sounds like it would get around the wifi requirement once it's set up.

Revenant said:

3D, audio, and multiplayer are the three big things still on the to-do list at the moment, in roughly descending order of priority. Hopefully the more time I have to work on this in the future, that stuff will all get done sooner than later, so we'll see.

Makes sense that multiplayer would be lower on the list. 3D was functional in elhobbs' port, but something about it felt weird and imprecise. Looking forward to seeing how you handle it.

There was a homebrew DSDoom port. Maybe you could take some hints from those guys.

Their official site is down so the only thing I can give you is the fake Doom Wiki page. http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/DsDoom

He points out, in his opening post, that there's another port being worked on that's based on DSDoom.

3noneTwo said:

Yeah, Tubehax's wifi necessity can be a bother. There's another method that uses the home menu itself to launch directly into the Homebrew menu, at the expense of being able to (easily) use a custom theme. I haven't tried it yet, but sounds like it would get around the wifi requirement once it's set up.

It works perfectly, thank you good sir! After installing, you just hold L when you boot it up. I tested it, it worked with the wifi off.

SavageCorona said:

Their official site is down so the only thing I can give you is the fake Doom Wiki page. http://doomwiki.org/wiki/DsDoom

haha owned

This awesome! I wish it was for Nintendo DSL...

If you're referring to the DS Lite, there's a Doom available for it but you'll need your own flash cartridge since the system lacks an exploit.

Cool! I saw some carts for pretty cheap on ebay.

Linguica said:

haha owned

fukin rekt amirite

ZephaniahNoah said:

Cool! I saw some carts for pretty cheap on ebay.

R4 is generally considered good.

With the release of Smea's *hax 2.5 payload, I've noticed PrBoom3ds now has trouble exiting back to Homebrew menu. This could be an issue with *hax 2.5 itself, but I figure I ought to mention it here anyway.

Opening and Quitting from menu once will cause PrBoom3ds to wait on a black screen after the Endoom screen, requiring the player to use Smea's new Exit To Homebrew Menu button combination (L+R+B+DPad-Down) in order to shut it down properly. Opening and Quitting from menu a second time will cause PrBoom3ds to hang at the Endoom screen and ignore all inputs, and a forced power-off is the only way out.

Smea's exit combo works without any issues, making it a convenient workaround.

Aside, *hax 2.5 introduces the ability to take raw screenshots using the Home button. Obviously it's not an urgently needed feature, but it'd be neat if it was possible to take advantage of that somehow!


edit: Apparently, Homebrew running on *hax 2.5 now has to actively make use of the faster clockrate on New 3DS. Twitter (quoted) & GBAtemp:

by default the higher clockrate is no longer enabled. you need to update to latest ctrulib and add osSetSpeedupEnable(1)

Uploaded a new build which should work on 2.5 (and with speedup on N3DS).

Might start doing some more stuff with this soon (audio?) I think I need to buy a new 3DS for homebrew sooner or later because getting the exploits to work reliably on the old 3DS is a complete nightmare.

Uploaded yet another build with what should be fully working sound effect support. (Here's a crappy video of it in action, in case you forgot what the IWAD demos sound like.)

Later on I'll re-introduce music, but next I'm probably going to do a little more frontend work as well as a proper rename of the project.

Awesome! Glad you're still doing this. Speedup is very noticeable on N3DS!

Uncapped Framerate enabled: Dropped frames are very infrequent on 400x320, and virtually gone in 320x200 (I counted literally one black flicker after starting Map01, and it never reoccurred).
There's very minor instances of audio clicks/stutter - it's really more like gaps of silence that last for one frame, occurring roughly three times per second. That description might sound disruptive, but it really just makes the audio sound slightly choppy. It's mainly noticeable in longer sound effects, like with fireballs or doors opening/closing.

Uncapped Framerate disabled: Dropped frames seem to be basically eliminated completely in all resolutions. 400x320 is still prone to it, but it's rare and completely negligible.
Audio is smooth and clean, no stutter/choppy qualities whatsoever.

Curiously, I don't think there's actually any loss in framerate by having Uncapped Framerate disabled. When I had it enabled, there might've actually been a minor slowdown in gameplay due to extra frames being processed, though the actual framerate itself felt consistent. Not a problem by any means, just an observation.


Music will be interesting, since the 3DS doesn't really have any MIDI. I'm assuming a MIDI soundfont or Adlib/OPL emulation would come into play instead. Playing without music though, I don't really feel like I'm missing out on anything important. Having sound effects alone makes the experience really satisfying. (Noticed that a "Can't do that" menu sound effect works too - I had the Select button bound to Screenshot just to see if it'd actually take a screenshot. No dice!)

A nicer frontend would be great though. Do you think you'd be testing any sort of touchscreen support, or are you just aiming to make it look/feel nicer for now?

I was just going to use Chocolate Doom's OPL3 playback for lack of anything more feasible. (except for maybe FluidSynth but I'm not going to be trying that right now)

I wonder if the black flickers between frames are a N3DS thing, since I never seem to notice that on my old 3DS whenever slowdown occurs.

This sounds awesome, I hadn't heard about this in the homebrew circles, needs some more advertising ;)

I was disappointed to hear that that other 3DS DOOM is based on the original DS port, because that port was an absolute mess. I spent a few days trying to fix it, but I think starting over from scratch is really the way to go.

Edit: Tried it out, it's pretty awesome so far. Typical of PRBOOM, I had to open the CFG file and change a few things, like the default gamma. Noticed a couple graphical glitches, but those might be fixable with "renderer settings". Tried taking a screenshot, but I think you have it disabled? The controls aren't bad, I haven't tried to change them back to what I'm used to yet. No more "one thousand chainsaws" bug like the DS port =)

Only noticed a couple of issues. I'm on a New3DS, if that matters, also playing in 320x200 to avoid the scaling issue:

When the screen size is maxed out, it still tries to update the sbar.

I'm sure you know about this, but I didn't see it mentioned, it stops updating the demo when you're in the config submenus.

Circle pad doesn't seem to actually be using analogue, so it feels kind of weird to use.


Minor things:

Colorflash should probably cover the entire screen(s), but I'm sure that's not very high priority.

Being able to press B to exit the menu would be nice. While in menu, maybe having it say "Pause" up top might be a nice touch? Maybe not?

The automap is kind of distracting, I can't seem to turn it off, but I'm assuming this will be changed when you add in touch-screen inventory (just like the Jaguar??).


Can't wait to see this in 3D =) Hopefully it doesn't drop the framerate too much.


Edit 2: I think putting it into sleep mode froze it =|

Now this is awesome! I played this for 1 straight hour and it works so great I can't believe I'm not playing on my pc!

But I'm having an issue with the saves, somehow when I try to save and confirm that I want to, the game just displays a message saying "Game save failed!"

I checked the folder isn't on read-only, tried with the other prboom for 3DS and works.

Any help?

Could it be an issue with the amount of free space on your SD card? Kind of hard to diagnose otherwise, sorry.

Anyway, sorry to say this, but my interest in 3DS development is pretty much nil right now, so I don't expect to be actively working on this in the near future. It was mainly created for my own personal amusement after I became able to run homebrew. In all honesty I didn't even use my 3DS for playing games much even back when I started working on this.

There's another(!) 3DS version of prboom which is now included with the homebrew starter kit, and from what I understand it should be less of a mess than the one I originally mentioned in the OP. I haven't personally tried it, though, but at least it's developed by someone with an actual presence on the 3DS homebrew scene, so I suspect it'll probably be more actively maintained.

I know my port is still the only one with a built-in frontend, but at some point I might just make that a standalone frontend for other ports, depending on how their development goes.

Appreciate the honesty! It's a shame, but I totally get it, better to work on something you're actively interested in. Thanks for your efforts!

Seems that new port is being handled by a developer who worked on DS Doom, so that'll be cool to see.

3noneTwo said:

Seems that new port is being handled by a developer who worked on DS Doom, so that'll be cool to see.

DS DOOM wasn't very good, though =| Although maybe that was a case of "too many cooks", from so many people dropping out and new guys taking over.

Maybe I will take a crack at this version, next time I have some free time (I was kind of planning on it anyway). I don't know if I can figure out how to add 3D, but I'm sure I could fix a lot of the other issues.

Well I was working on it a bit this weekend...I got a couple of things fixed, but then I started working on fixing the screen stretching, and ran into some errors. Citra says it requires 64-bit Windows, and I got tired of DOOM freezing my 3DS, so I might have to give up on this idea for a while =)

Registered here just to let you know that this is a fantastic port to the 3ds, much more so than the others I have tried (the two linked in this thread). I really hope this project doesn't die, it deserves more attention from the homebrew community. Kudos to you Revenant, well done!

EDIT: As a side, is there any guide out there that could help with converting this build of prboom into a cia? Been doing some research but can't seem to find any info on whether or not this is possible...

That "other" 3DS DOOM looks like it hasn't been updated at all, and doesn't run that great :)

I feel like maybe I should find some time to finish fixing the HUD in this version and get a release out there.

You didn't have a x64 OS in February, wtf? :D

Asaki said:

That "other" 3DS DOOM looks like it hasn't been updated at all, and doesn't run that great :)

I feel like maybe I should find some time to finish fixing the HUD in this version and get a release out there.

Are you talking about elhobbs' older port, or the slightly newer one by WinterMute? IIRC, the latter is the one that is (or was?) included with the homebrew starter kit. (Actually, it doesn't look like either of them have updated in nearly a year, after looking at GitHub...)

I haven't kept up with the 3DS scene at all except for the very short period of time I was working on this port, so I have no idea what the state of either of those ports is. It would be nice to see an updated/properly released version of mine at some point, but I don't think I'd be personally doing anything new with it unless the 3DS bug strikes me again at some point.

That said, I'm very glad that people (not just on Doomworld) have shown enjoyment for my port, despite the fact that I've never had any association with the actual 3DS community, and that I don't think I ever really advertised it outside of this thread. If it weren't for the fact that my interest in the 3DS as a whole was pretty short-lived, I probably would have ended up seeing this through to becoming a more fleshed-out project. I guess it's not out of the question for the future, though.

Man someones gotta work on this. This is my favorite 3ds doom port tbh its probably because of the fact that you can change the screen size and warp, but also because of the fact that the minimap is always on the bottom screen

It’d be cool to have a comprehensive review of the various 3ds ports on a doomwiki page

Revenant's fix for the monster movedir corruption was forcing all enums to default as int indexes in the Makefile settings. For those of you who prefer using elhobbs' port but are having trouble because of this glitch, I've compiled a build of his version with the fix included here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/88jt54btcxz992n/PrBoom3DS-movedir-fix.7z?dl=0

As a little note, saves created with the old build may not be compatible anymore, particularly if such corrupt enemies were generated during level play, but saves created on the new build will load fine.