When people talk about the lack of a DOOM being the doom Commodore home computers, they aren’t talking about the C64, which was deep into obsolescence when demon-slaying suddenly became the minimal requirement for all computing devices. That didn’t stop [Kamil Wolnikowski] and [Piotr Kózka] from hacking together Grey a ray-cast first-person shooter for the Commodore 64.
Grey bares more than a passing resemblance to id-software’s most-ported project. It apparently runs at 16 frames per second on a vanilla C64 — no super CPU required. The secret to the speedy game play is the engine’s clever use of the system’s color mapping functionality: updating color maps is faster than redrawing the screen. Yeah, that makes for rather “blockier” graphics than DOOM, but this is running on a Commodore 64, not a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. Allowances must be made. Come to think of it, we don’t recall DOOM running this smooth on the minimum required hardware — check out the demo video below and let us know what you think.
The four-level demo currently available is about 175 kB, which certainly seems within the realms of possibility for disk games using the trusty 1541. Of course nowadays we do have easier ways to get games onto our vintage computers.
If you’re thinking about Commodore’s other home computer, it did eventually get a DOOM-clone.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip.
“Commodore’s Most Popular Computer Gets DOOM-style Shooter”
That is a clickbait title – leave enough information missing to make people click the link to see “what on earth are they talking about?”.
I’m curious what you think is missing. We didn’t explicitly name the C-64, true, but it’s pretty common knowledge how popular it was in these circles. Likewise, the game DOOM is, uh, not exactly unknown.
If there’s information missing it’s because of the assumption that target audience will fill in the blanks, and not a deliberate attempt at click-baiting.
“Most popular” – that begs the question, what was Commodore’s most popular computer? It plays on the assumption that you know it was the C64 and since it isn’t named outright, you start to doubt yourself. Was there another computer?
Fair enough.
Don’t feed the troll, i guess…
If you want an actual troll comment:
Autistic people have difficulties of intuiting what other people know or understand, so they tend to assume everyone else knows what they know and feel by default, so when other people don’t, the person tends to deem them as dumb or intentionally malicious – i.e. trolls.
Basically, instead of saying the obvious, you substitute it with something that causes the reader to do a double take.
Example, “There’s one ingredient in candies that makes people fat.”
Article: “It’s sugar”.
The answer is obvious, but omitting a direct reference makes you doubt you already know it. You might reveal the information in the abstract/lead-in but that doesn’t make the title any less click-baity.
Seems like an entirely reasonable headline to me… what would you have them write? The entire article in the headline???!
Commodore 64 gets doom style shooter.
Leave these people alone and start your own blog, if you don’t like the headlines. Everyone knows what “most popular computer” meant, and it was a much more interesting headline than your proposed.
I wasn’t sure I knew, which is why I made the comment.
Djeez, is this about the ‘most popular computer’…?
I thought everyone was griping about that this is a Wolfenstein style shooter and not a Doom style shooter…
But come on, who DOESN’T know that the C64 was Commodore’s most popular computer?
I wasn’t sure, so I got caught by the bait and clicked the link to confirm.
Hence why I made the comment.
It’s not like C64 has had pretty good exposure here in recent weeks, or anything. For the last few years, even. I have no idea what planet he’s on.
On a planet where paying attention to such things is of secondary importance.
That’s my gripe with a lot of “gets doom”, “created doom in excel”, they’re just Wolfenstein. Doom has textured floors and the player can move up and down.
“We call all raycasters Doom because people don’t know Wolfenstein” yah, because compared to Doom it’s mediocre.
Advertising completely flat grid environments as “just like DOOM” has always been a pet-peeve of mine
I believe Doom was a “2.5D” game where the map was essentially flat, but you could define the height of the floor and the ceiling to create the illusion of a 3D space.
Oh my, Doom! That game needs a CRT filter so badly!
The worst type of household color TV from the Atari 2600 era might do.
Something that blurs and masks the low-res graphics so hard in a way it looks natural. IMHO.
Still, it’s impressive for a children’s computer, I think. 🙂
I thought the topic of this post was the development of a videogame, but went fair away from that at the very first comment! I mean who cares! the game is awesome and the sounds is like the first kiss for a gamer , stay focused guys!
Cool! I am not a first person shooter person, but this looks like fun. No blood, gore, human killing humans, … and runs on an old C64. Simple graphics. No need for fancy graphic cards. Love it. Good job.