DOOM. The first-person shooter was an instant hit upon its mrelease at the end of 1993. It was soon ported off the PC platform to a number of consoles with varying success. Fast forward a few years, and it became a meme. People were porting Doom to everything from thermostats to car stereos and even inside Microsoft Word itself.
The problem is that porting Doom has kind of jumped the shark at this point. Just about every modern microcontroller or piece of consumer electronics these days has enough grunt to run a simple faux-3D game engine from 1993. It’s been done very much to death at this point. The time has come for a new meme port!
Good Game
Doom became a popular meme port for multiple reasons. For one, it’s just complex and resource-intensive enough to present a challenge, without being so demanding as to make ports impractical or impossible. It’s also been open-source for decades, and the engine has been hacked to death. It’s probably one of the best understood game engines out there at this point. On top of that, everybody plays Doom at some point, and it was one of the biggest games of the 90s. Put all that together, and you’ve got the perfect meme port.
However, you can always have too much of a good thing. Just as The Simpsons got old after season 10 and Wonderwall is the worst song you could play at a party, Doom ports have been overdone. But what other options are there?
Quake
While Doom is credited as a groundbreaking first-person shooter, it doesn’t have that much in common with the genre as we know it today. It merely created the illusion of a 3D environment with clever 2D tricks, and didn’t have the free-rolling mouselook that we now take for granted. Released in 1996, Quake was a real step forward. The game featured real-time 3D rendering, making it a far more demanding game for mid-1990s computers to run.
Compared to Doom, Quake’s fully-3D engine presents a more demanding challenge for those trying to port it to unusual hardware. At the same time, like Doom, the engine’s source code has been available under an open-source license since 1999. Thus, it’s readily available to anyone who wishes to tinker with it. It’s also a widely-popular game well embedded in the broader hacker consciousness. If your friends are showing off their Doom ports, pulling off a Quake port is an easy way to one-up them.
Half-Life/Counter-Strike
If Quake is still too old for your tastes, you might find Half-Life more relevant. Released in 1999, it became popular for its rich science-fiction plot and compelling gameplay. Funnily enough, Half-Life ran on the GoldSrc engine, which was developed and heavily modified from the original Quake engine. Most crucially, it added robust AI and skeletal animation features, which brought the FPS genre to new levels of immersion. Half Life soon became a popular basis for mods, spawning the immensely-successful Counter Strike amongst many others.
The source code for GoldSrc was never officially released, but the engine is well understood and has been reverse-engineered by numerous projects like Xash3D and FreeHL. These community-created engines could provide a solid starting point for any porting efforts.
You won’t have much luck getting a full-version of Half-Life running on a space-constrained platform—the game took up over 250 MB of disk space, compared to Quake, at under 80 MB, and Doom, which fit on a couple of floppy disks. Still, it’s not supposed to be easy—it’s supposed to be hard! With that said, few people expect you to include a full single-player game with a meme port. Usually, one playable level is enough. In Half-Life’s case, maybe that could be the mind-numbing unskippable intro that has you riding a tram for twenty minutes. Alternatively, do a multiplayer Counter-Strike port that lets you run around de_dust. That should be enough.
Crysis: The Impossible Flex
Ah, Crysis. The tropical jungle game that brought high-end PCs to their knees when it launched in 2007. For over a decade, “But can it run Crysis?” was a tongue-in-cheek benchmark for computing power. If that phrase sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a reskin of a much older saying—”Can it run DOOM?” For this reason alone, it deserves a mention here.
The problem with Crysis is that it’s a thoroughly modern game with thoroughly modern requirements. Running on CryEngine2, it featured advanced lighting, motion blur and depth of field effects, and even a multi-threaded physics engine that let you blast chunks out of the environment. Getting even a heavily downscaled version of Crysis running on inappropriate hardware would thus be the ultimate flex in the hardware hacking community.
Crysis followed Far Cry, continuing Crytek’s theme of putting its name in the title of its games, and its focus on building games in tropical environs.
There’s just one problem—source code for Crysis nor CryEngine 2 was ever really released to the public. The closest you could get is the open-source Open 3D engine, which is related to CryEngine by a few degrees of separation. Without the source, it’s hard to really port at all. You could remake Crysis on whatever platform you like, but it’s not really the same thing.
Ultimately, though, this just ups the challenge. You need to be charismatic enough, rich enough, or a good enough thief, to get the source code out of Crytek’s archives in the first place. Then you can pull off the meme port to end all meme ports.
Why Bother?
Impractical ports aren’t about actually playing a game on weird hardware. Sure, a few people might have enjoyed tapping around Doom on an iPod, but by and large, that’s beyond the point. They do, however, serve several purposes beyond just bragging rights. In reality, they’re a test of skill, and a way to explore what’s really possible on a random piece of hardware. Can you play Half Life on a Toyota infotainment system from 2022? Well, there’s one good way to find out!
The next time you’re looking at your smart dishwasher and thinking about making it run Doom, consider aiming higher. Your project might take longer and cause more headaches, but imagine the satisfaction when you’ve got Gordon Freeman fighting headcrabs on your smart TV, or Trent Reznor’s Quake soundtrack pumping out of your e-reader. Doom is great, but it’s been done. It’s time to move on!
Descent ?
I loved that game. It’s very 1990s, though: more advanced than Doom (genuine 3D environments) but not in the same league as the later games mentioned here.
Thank you, games to this day do not have 6 degrees of freedom, and it had high resolution and VR support way before it was cool (AKA the mid-90s). Which is also its achilles heel. Often it gets ports to systems without enough controls, or worse: with motion controls that go unused.
It has similarly been open source for decades. The only downside is the copyright holder is unreachable, but a spiritual successor would be Overload.
Descent 2 (the one with VR support) was the pukiest VR experience ever!
Now why didn’t I think of that.
The source is open and there are at least two decent working ports
* D2X-XL – https://www.descent2.de/ (massively rewritten engine with support for much more recent GPU stuff)
* DXX-Rebirth – https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ (more of a straight port of the engine into modern times without “changing” it)
FSOpen?
Descent is exactly what came to my mind too. Basically Doom but with legit 3D graphics and 6DOF motion, so it feels like the logical next step.
And I loved that game and wish that full 6 DOF games were more common. If meme-porting it creates some additional interest in the genre, that’d be a nice side effect.
YES!
you really want a game with an efficient software renderer because that enables more targets. you cannot always count on the presence of a gpu hardware. i also think the floating point problem is another thing to worry about, i think the descent source code in its virgin state still relies on a lot of fixed point math. which should make it easier to port. quake has that problem in droves, absolutely must have x87, though i had seen one hack that worked around that issue emulating the chip. descent you dont have to do anything like that since so long as you got a hardware int multiply you should be able to run it.
Doom!
doom is the replacement for doom.
With deathmatch. That was the biggest thrill back in the days and is still. Would love to see a lawnmower vs a pregnancy test!
Exactly. You can’t really force a meme. It’s not decided rationally, it evolves naturally.
Doom 2?
Blood
“Wonderwall is the worst song you could play at a party” – disagree. The Mike Flower Pop’s version can be played at any party.
It could be played, but that doesn’t mean it’s wise. I used to work with someone who was part of a group of people with musicogenic epilepsy. I doubt they did many needle drops, unless you mean an autoinjector full of lorazepam. I don’t mean to make fun, he was a lovely guy and adored music but had to actively avoid anything with a repetitive beat, which is to say I do mean to make fun, just not of him, just my own discomfort with a minor tragedy.
there was a game called magic carpet 2 (bullfrog interactive) it was the first game i played in 640×480 and my mind was blown away at that time. as i remember around 100mb on hdd, rest of the cd was videos and music.
How dare you
How dare you
How dare you
How dare you
How dare you
How dare (you)
How dare (you)
How dare (you)
How dare (you)
How dare (you)
This is all wrong
ScummVM could be fun…
And has been ported to quite a few systems. But, generally has very specific graphics resolution requirements.
Doom is used because:
– It’s iconic
– It can adapt to a wide range of resolutions
– It doesn’t require a GPU and was optimized for software rendering
– Was made with low resources in mind as a whole, so no need for large amounts of memory/CPU/storage
Also being a standard, its easy to define that it was implemented in a meaningful way and not just faked to death
Well, anything including and exceeding 320×240 is a go for ScummVM. But here we start with another thing, porting libSDL is more or less all you need to do here for a basic port, if you have that you can run ScummVM.
So, who wants to port libSDL to a RP2350, you might need the PSRAM feature, with a cheap ILI SPI LCD and Touch support? 😁
as long as it uses a 555, meh….
It would be interesting to see what could have Portal shoehorned into running on it.
Well, there is Portal64 (canceled at Valve’s request) which ran on the Nintendo 64.
It’s more accurate to describe it as “cancelled at Valve’s suggestion”.
IIRC the whole situation is that the dev talked to Valve about putting Portal64 on Steam (wrapped in an emulator) and Valve was fine with the game itself but was worried that it’d cause issues with Nintendo, primarily because it was developed with Nintendo’s dev tools that were leaked or reverse engineered or something.
If Nintendo would okay it then Valve would and it’d get a Steam release.
IMO Black Mesa is all you need for evidence that Valve absolutely would allow it without the Nintendo issue.
Portal Porting would be a fun contest at hacker cons
Pretty sure portal has been ported to Doom at some point…
Silicon Labs have their MG24Quake (https://github.com/next-hack/MG24Quake/tree/main) that supports the full retail game. Espressif also have their ESP32P4 Quake (https://github.com/espressif/esp32-quake) that supports music, USB keyboard and even multiplayer quake client and server.
So you want to change things up and all your replacements are….more shooters. How absolutely boring.
I feel this!
kerbal space program!
Interstate ’76
Or Syndicate
Someone should start by getting it to run properly on a modern OS at all.
You can buy it on gog. They say it works on windows 10. I haven’t tried it.
i76 ran on the mechwarrior 2 engine. so if you can port that you can get 31cc, mercs, and the legendary gbl.
Pong
Nah, too easy
I was thinking either Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, Wolfenstein 3D, or Pac-Man World
Something politically correct, no shooting one.
Look into Anarch. It has such a philosophy and runs well on limited architecture.
Ade Edmondson’s How To Be A Complete Bastard, I can get behind that totally.
Bully?
Perhaps Postal 2 would work?
Ironically, while Postal 2 definitely has some 00’s edgyness to it, the story (the little there is) is basically about a dude who just wants to mind his own business but is constantly put in extremely shitty situations.
The original Postal however…
Why, so nobody will like it and it never catches on? Great idea
Probably Mario 64 since it’s been decompiled
This article is attempting to doom Doom itself 😂
😂😂😂 Yep.
Global Thermonuclear War.
Make the wrong move and everybody everbody loses.
Global World War 4 can be played with sticks and stones.
I’ll just leave that here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160109145028/http://quake.drunkencoders.com/index_q1.html
I actually beta tested his exram build… worked awesomly…
Descent or Quake would be a good step up from the original Doom, but the Doom 3 engine (idtech4) has been open-sourced and it’s a much more modern shooter, a good few other modern-ish shooters use the same engine such as the original Prey, which probably shows off the engine’s graphics and physics capabilities the best.
the problem is it kind of has to be doom because you mostly have to be over 40 to be like “wow my kid’s diaper can run a videogame from 30 years ago, now that is impressive”. the fact that it’s been doom for so long tells us exactly who we are and how we think. we’re trying to recapture the feeling of awe we had as kids
(my biggest accomplishment in my 44 years was ‘aavga’ – a wrapper for ascii art aalib that presented the svgalib interface, and was famously used by someone else to make aaquake)
Another option for that age demographic: Battletoads. Let Gen X relive hours of frustration on a memetically difficult game anywhere
That’s a big disservice to your generation, don’t you think?
IMHO using Doom as a symbol for identity is an insult to all those good-hearted kids of 80s and 90s playing innocently on their NES.
When I was young, I’ve been there when Doom was new and I wasn’t impressed.
Back in mid-90s, being used to game consoles, I thought those graphics were blocky and ugly and from 10 years ago.
Obviously, I had no idea how backwards, immature and bloodlusty PC users were around me.
I had overestimated them completely, I saw them as better people then they actually were. I feel that I was such a fool.
Ok. Other topic. Notable other games I remember playing on PC DOS in the 90s,
were Prince of Persia, EGA Trek, CD Man, Psion Chess, Sam&Max Hit The Road, Toonstruck,
A Final Unity, some flight sims, Commander Keen, Jill of Jungle,
Jazz Jackrabbit BlockOut, In Search of Dr. Riptide, Leisure Suit Larry..
Heck, I’ve tried out even Descent, Zone 66 and Magic Carpet and those Megatech games such as Knights of Xentar or Cobra City! : D
Or SkiFree, Comet Busters and other little desktop games on Windows 3.x!
On consoles, there had been way more games than Doom!
– Super Mario World, StarWing, SimCity, F-Zero, PilotWings, Lufia, Secret of Mana, Terranigma, Chrono Trigger, DK Country etc on Super NES
– Soleil (Crusader of Centy), Phantasy Star IV, Sonic, Castle of Illusion, Ecco the Dolphin, Lionking or Aladdin on Mega Drive
– Phantasy Star on Sega Mastersystem
– Snatchers on Mega CD
– Kirby, Mario Land, Wario Land, Tetris etc on GB
That’s just a small, biased list of course.
In reality, dungeon crawlers and other genres had been a thing, too.
The SNES was beloved for JRPGs, while PC games had simulations and adventures which took advantage of Super VGA.
Flight Simulator 5 was popular, for example.
Or the adventure games by Legend Entertainment, Virgin etc.
Then there had been higher resolution ports in the 90s for Macintosh platform,
because it ran at 640×480 pixels when DOS standard was still lofy 320×200 (aka mode 13h).
Classic games like SimCity or Prince of Persia looked much better here.
But these are just my two cents. I didn’t mean to say a thing, originally.
I just can’t stand it when my generation and that before is being labeled as “doom generation”,
because I know for sure it didn’t apply to me at the very least.
Being collectively called “NES generation” or “C64 generation” would have been less of an insult to our generations, I think.
My apologies, I perhaps shouldn’t have been so harsh here.
Maybe even don’t comment, at all. But it really had triggered me.
Of course, I know that not all Doom lovers are antisocial mean old men that may snap and shoot around anytime.
Even if it sometimes feels like that. Sigh.
But still, I had different memories of the 90s with Doom being more of a footnote in my life. I couldn’t care less!
Even the annoyingly overrated “Secret of Monkey Island” that those boomers admire all day long had been a bigger impact.
And I think there were truely fascinating games like StarWing or F-Zero that I can relate to.
Or games such as MS Flight Simulator, Ford Simulator, Hard Drivin’ or Test Drive on PC.
Peaceful 3D games like “Alpha Waves” or BlockOut did pre-date Doom, as well.
I remember their articles in PC magazines.
They weren’t full of action, maybe, but had a certain atmosphere and with a sense of exploration.
But maybe that’s just me, being sort of a sci-fi nerd who believed in a better humanity without a constant need of exposure to violence, gore, death and sadism.
It’s not as if there hadn’t been lots of tragic events in real life at the time (early to mid 90s). Second Gulf War, the war in Bosnia etc.
PS: When Doom was under development,
there already had been graphically sophisticated 32-Bit game consoles such as 3DO, Philips CD-i or Atari Jaguar.
This was at the height of the CD-ROM and multimedia hype, I think.
You had FMVs (full-motion videos) in TV resolution when Doom in 1994/95 proudly had used oldfashioned mode 13h graphics in 320×200 256c. Using 8-Bit writes at PC/XT speeds!
Not even VESA VBE graphics, which the average VGA graphics cards from 1988 could do!
With UniVBE driver, 640×400 256c or 640×480 256c had been technically possible even on the oldest VGA cards (256KB VGA RAM limited things to mode 100h, 640×400 256c).
ET-4000AX had an 8514/A driver shipped and could do 1024×768 on DOS via 8514/A standard. Slowly, of course.
But a PC at the time could never been fast enough to gamers, anyway.
An overclocked 486 VLB PC or Pentium PCI PC was minimum to them, so sticking to mode 13h for performance reasons seems like a lame excuse to me.
Especially since true 3D accelerators such as Nvidia NV1 or S3 ViRGE were right around the corner..
Though 2D blitting was technically being possible with any 2D GUI accelerator by early 90s already.
Besides 8514/A, there had been XGA, XGA2 and TIGA standard, as well as the popular ATI Mach series. S3 Tri32/64 had an 8514/A derived core, too.
But that’s not my point. I just don’t like history revisionism:
To my knowledge 320×200 256c wasn’t state of the art in 1994,
and neither was Doom with its pseudo-3D engine. IMHO!
By that time, MCGA/VGA and mode 13h had been 7 years old already!
For comparison, by ’93/94, the Sega Genesis had the 32x and Sega CD add-ons that could do more!
Using parts that used to be used in home computers and arcade cabs.
haha i’m just saying, nothing was impressive the way doom was. it just looked good and did some things previous games had never achieved. it required a powerful computer and rewarded you for it.
“good-hearted kids of 80s and 90s playing innocently on their NES.”
Most of them mass murdering goombas or koopas, or shooting up ducks just for joy. Much less violent than Doom.
Replace it with a game that doesn’t involve crime or shooting people. Like a racing game, or Descent, or Sport. Don’t know why we gravitate to first person shooters in the first place.
Katamari!
There’s always Chex Quest if you want a less violent Doom variant.
run brutal doom with the chex quest wads.
Maybe Postal 2 would be a good choice?
Wipeout would work really well thinking about it. It’s iconic, there are open source versions, and it was considered groundbreaking at the time. https://github.com/phoboslab/wipeout-rewrite
Ooooh! That’s a great call.
(The soundtrack was half the fun.)
I love this idea. It’s iconic, it’s an upgrade to a 3D engine, and the gameplay is a change of pace. The legality of the available code is questionable because it was derived from leaked source … but for homebrew proofing projects it’s still usable.
Spoken like someone who’s never experienced the adrenaline rush something like F.E.A.R. gives after the “introductionary bits”
Stunts!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_(video_game)
I loved this game as a kid. Especially the track editor.
Same with micromachines 2 which also had a track editor.
We used to randomly change the car files to see of we could get instant acceleration !
Ah yes, something that everyone loves and thinks is fun: moral prudery
I’d like to throw in Serious Sam – ports should be fun! And this one packs a lot of that :)
Here’s one in WASM/Browser: https://martinmullins.github.io/blog/2021/01/26/Serious-Sam-Engine-In-The-Web-Browser/
Seems like the obvious answer is for someone to make a FPS game with the aesthetics of the shadow art Bad Apple video.
It’d be insane if there’d be pushes to port the reverse-engineered Legend of Zelda titles (OOT/MM) to basically everything. It was awesome when id open-sourced DOOM, and not just because Carmack destroyed trigonometry all throughout GitHub, but also for the history of video games in general.
It’d be interesting to see if Nintendo would get its head out of its ass if it became obvious to them that they can’t control things nearly as much as they want to.
I’d rather they just get the reverse-engineered copy to compile consistently first.
I tried compiling via the Docker container (so theoretically everything should be set) and couldn’t get it to compile, it’d just error out halfway through.
Commander Keen
Just because nobody expects it.
Pathways Into Darkness
You can’t force a meme
It must take on it’s own life
It’s Doom forever
The original f.e.a.r
The particle effects alone would be a headache. The original F.E.A.R.’s gunfights were very pretty because of it. And then there’s getting the AI right (still quite good for today, fwiw.)
Duke Nukem !!!
If you mean DN3D then just wait for few weeks :)
There is only one true test: Crysis
I’m legitimately dissapointed in the same way a parent would be over their kid making constant bad decisions despite being raised properly that it took this long for someone to mention crysis.
Like, I feel like I should go out in my garage and smoke half a pack of cigs and drink a sixpack while wondering where the hell I did wrong.
And I don’t drink, smoke nor have kids.
Save your beer! Lewin mentions it in the article.
I remember getting Nethack 3.0 to run on real mode DOS was an exercise with trying config options until you found a combination that fit into conventional memory.
Maybe not as flashy as Doom, but I probably have more hours into Nethack over the years than any of the games listed. And it’s somewhat demanding in terms of memory, but you could wiggle an I/O pin at 2400 bps and effectively have a playable Nethack experience.
replacing Doom…what are yo u talking about?
What about Bioshock?
The NES games are written in 6502 but there are a lot of 6502 emulators out there.
The fact you can run Doom in a browser to me is amazing in itself.
You can even emulate an Apple //e in a browser.
So maybe it’s not a matter of “Can it run Doom”, but “Can it run Doom efficiently?”
Old games like Rise Of The Triad, Day Of the Tentacle, Heretic, Hexxen are still good games.
Yes, modern hardware can run Doom and with more and more devices being internet connected
and containing a CPU, running Doom is trivial.
Porting Quake was surprisingly easy, because it’s still all software rendering like Doom. When iD first released the source some friends and I ported it to run under X11 on the solaris machines at uni. Some nasty hacks copying the framebuffer to the window and mouse input was handled by constantly warping the pointer to the centre of the window and taking note of the offsets. For all the jank it worked extremely well!
Quake seems like a good single step up but I think Half-Life is the best choice because it’s a significant leap.
Lemmings.
Saw an HTML4 or 5 port entirely in browser 10 years ago or more.
Is Lemmings harder or easier to code up on a toaster, though?
I had exactly the same thought, but we have to play along with Lewin’s “it has to be a step up in difficulty” premise.
Browser “ports” often run on emulators and are not ported to run natively. You want to avoid running emulators on embedded targets. It’s better to compile for a target from source and port the API calls.
Red Alert was released in open source, would love to play it on my toaster !
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/02/ea-just-open-sourced-command-conquer-red-alert-renegade-and-generals/
+1
I just read this headline. Definitely a good candidate.
https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Red_Alert
Give me my Tesla coils! (I forked this the moment I saw it.)
Daggerfall or Morrowind is clearly the next best option. It’s a more recent game than Doom and just as iconic in its own circles, but still very resources-light (by today’s standards).
The problem there is not the size but the DirectX requirements. Most (if not all) microcontrollers can’t handle it and it’s Windows-fixed. You’d have to rebuild the graphics from the ground up. Not impossible but definitely a huge challenge.
OpenMW already does this! It’s quite a bit more visually complex than the original Morrowind, though; it might still be necessary to write at least part of a renderer for the target platform.
cyberpunk 2077…..but it’ll be 2077.
Crysis?
I want to See if Original 2007 era Hardware can run the remaster of Crysis
Why replace it? It’s a meme, leave it as DOOM. Forced memes are dumb and bad, and you should feel bad.
I love testing ARM boards from Desktop/Server class to SBC’s. I like throwing OpenMW at them for native 3D testing, and then I see what the performance of Crysis is under Wine & Box86. Of course, the best testing comes from code that is fully open source especially if using alternative architectures. Doom 3 BFG would be the next generation I’d recommend.
what i would like to see is og unreal. the intro of which can be found in practically any voodoo card restoration video on youtube (and looks good to this day). you could make the argument that it is an unreal engine game. so it has lineage to a lot of games that run on an unreal engine to this day.
unreal has challenges (especially if the reflective floor in the castle doesn’t work, i wont call it a successful port). i think you specifically need to render with glide to get that effect. im pretty sure it doesnt work with an opengl renderer. in fact glide had some tricks that took the other apis forever to support.
Can’t believe no one has mentioned Settlers or Settlers 2!
What about System Shock (the original)? The download is on archive.org and it’s 300MB roughly, which isn’t too demanding. Also a “true” 3D game.
It’s already had several meme ports in its first year of existence so I think the answer is obvious – Balatro. It’s tiny, lightweight, turn based, 2d, it’s relatively easy to mod and mess with, and it’s extremely, extremely fun.
Quake too large?
I remember stripping down Quake to a single deathmatch level and it fit on two 1.44MB floppies. I did the same for Quake 2 and I shrunk it down to 3 floppies. That easily fits on the flash of an RP2040 or ESP32.
Bad Milk
typo? “upon its mrelease”