Hacker News Reader

Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remember the SNES port of Doom? By all accounts, it was a piece of sh!t compared to the PC version, but talk about wringing out what you could of the limited SNES hardware

View on HN

SNES doom was a total labor of love by Randy Linden, the story behind it is very interesting: https://www.shacknews.com/article/117004/super-doom-how-id-s... He created it without even getting the rights to do so first and id was so impressed they had to publish it. It's arguably an even bigger programming achievement than regular Doom as the SNES has no business doing anything remotely close to Doom. A lot of the work to make it run on the SNES (simplifying some levels and such) went on to almost all the other console ports too. Yeah it wasn't the best Doom experience, but it was still pretty amazing for what was basically a souped up 6502 processor on the SNES.

SNES DOOM does have the Super FX chip, which draws textured polygons to an on-cart framebuffer for DMA transfer to main video memory. It runs at 21 MHz, much faster than the SNES console itself and actually not all that far off from the Playstation or a 486 PC.

That's great but doom doesn't use polygons and is a texture mapped raycasting engine. Super FX does help speed up some vector math operations but it's still quite limited.

If you played SNES doom you would know it's really pushing the system to the absolute limits. The frame rate is pretty low and cropped play area is small. They had to simplify a bit of level geometry to get the BSPs and other level traversal logic for stuff like enemy AI to fit in memory (which was 128 kilobytes!). They didn't even have enough CPU power to texture the floor and ceiling.

The SNES port was my first introduction to Doom. What a blast from the past.

Why do you censor yourself?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com