Porting DOOM to new hardware and software platforms is a fun pastime for many in the hacker scene. [DragonMinded] noticed that nobody had ported the game to the Sega Naomi arcade hardware, and set about doing so herself.
The port builds on work by [Kristoffer Andersen] who built a framebuffer port of DOOM previously. It’s available pre-compiled, complete with the shareware WAD for those eager to load it up on their own Naomi arcade cabinets.
Unlike some limited ports that only give the appearance of a functional version of DOOM, this port is remarkably complete. Loading, saving, and options menus are all present and accounted for, as well as directional sound and even WAD auto-discovery. With that said, there’s only 32 KB of space for save games on the Naomi hardware, so keep that in mind if you find yourself playing regularly.
We love a good DOOM port, whether it’s on an arcade machine, an old forgotten Apple OS, or even a UFI module.
Okay but what if I ported Doom to the Sega Naomi? pic.twitter.com/vY0zjZemka
— Super Jentendo (@dragonminded) April 18, 2022
Thanks to [Itay] for the tip, via PCGamesN
I imagine it wasn’t the most difficult port, as there are plenty of Doom ports to the Dreamcast. Still very impressive and I would love to get my hands on a cabinet to play.
You’d be surprised. Lewin sort of buried the lede here, which is that this port uses hardware acceleration, rather than being a straight-up framebuffer-based affair. Funny enough, DragonMinded’s work towards this port ended up having positive benefits in other areas, as she found and fixed a couple of issues in MAME’s handling of the Dreamcast/Naomi’s PowerVR chipset along the way.
How about porting it to the Dreamcast and using one of those devices that connects an SD card to the serial port for save games? IIRC Naomi has 2x the RAM of the Dreamcast, but the Dreamcast has more RAM than DOOM required on a PC.
We did port DOOM to Dreamcast, about twenty years ago, and even had split-screen multiplayer.
Wouldn’t it just be easier now to list hardware that can’t run Doom?
I’m not sure if Babylonian clay tablets can run DOOM…
it’s the framebuffer, terribly terribly slow.
Could you please run Doom on Sega Naomi emulated with Mame x86 which is compiled into WASM running in my browser?