Last week, we examined a Doom port for the venerable Atari ST. As is so often the way with this thing, one netted another, and [Steve] wrote in to inform us about a different version under the name DOOM8088ST.
The port is so named because it’s based on Doom8088, which was originally written for DOS machines running Intel 8088 or 286 CPUs. Both ports are the work of [FrenkelS], and aims to bring the Doom experience into the far more resource constrained environment of the Atari ST. There is only very limited sound, no saving, and it only supports Doom 1 Episode 1. Still, it’s quite recognizable as Doom!
Doom8088ST is tunable to various levels of performance, depending on what you’re running it on. Low mode (30 x 128) is suitable for stock Atari ST machines running at 8 MHz. It’s described as having “excellent” framerate and is very playable. If you’ve got an upgraded ST or Mega STe, you can try Medium (60 x 128), which has greatly improved visuals but is a lot heavier to run.
Files are on Github for those interested to run or tinker with the code. Don’t forget to check out the other port we featured last week, either, in the form of STDOOM. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Steve for the tip!]
If you are wondering why the low horizontal resolution: Atari made an unfortunate choice with the pixel format of the color modes. For the 16 color mode in memory you have two bytes with the first bit of 16 pixels, then two bytes with the second bit of 16 pixels, then two bytes with the third bit of 16 pixels, then two bytes with the fourth bit of 16 pixels. By setting 8 pixels to the “same” color, this implementation does not have to merge multiple pixels into one byte.
As I recall, a similar issue made it difficult to do fast texture-mapped 3D on the Amiga – the Bitplane approach that the Amiga took meant that updating each pixel on the screen took multiple cycles. The hardware sprites didn’t have that problem (or at least, hid it from the programmer) which is why so many Amiga games that needed super-fast screen updates are either of the platformer type (Chuck Rock, Zool, Rick Dangerous) or, if “3D”, used simple single-color polygons (Resolution 101).
So it’s basically a chained planar mode. Madness.
If it reads the wad it is a port, aka original assets and compatibility with original game files. If it is a rewrite I would call this a Demake. I assuming it is the latter.
It’s a fork of PrBoom.
Might wanna check out the latest build that was just released today. Also… https://youtu.be/lzDHngjYb40?t=85
There goes another missed opportunity to port to Atari ST’s hi-res graphics (640×400 mono).
Would have been interesting to see the engine running in pure monochrome, with redrawn graphics assets that need no dithering.
The wall textures, for example, could have been redrawn in nice b/w.