It seems NCommander’s horrid journey porting Doom to AIX is inspiring others to the same. This time around, Cariad Keigher ported Doom to a more obscure UNIX variant – Apple’s A/UX.
I’ve never considered porting Doom before, but I was curious if my favourite abandoned UNIX variant had a port. With some very brief cursory searches on Google and GitHub, I was led to believe that this was unlikely or if it had been done, it was never publicly announced a port or it has been lost to the sands of time.
If it is the case nobody has bothered, there is a good reason: it isn’t exactly necessary. Once I explain A/UX, it’ll make sense why I am likely the first person ever to port the game to this platform.
All I can say is – godspeed to people like NCommander and Keigher. This sort of hackery makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, even if I don’t always understand all the details of the programming work they’re doing. I wonder who will pick up the baton and what obscure UNIX will get a Doom port next.
May I make a suggestion?
Why Doom btw? Can’t they port one of the Quakes to showcase the OpenGL support of those systems? Maybe even Doom 3?
Maybe because it did not have OpenGL?
The latest version of that operating system is cited to be 27 years old:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
Compared to that OpenGL is only two years older:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL
Still AIX and the rest of the “workstation” unixes do have OpenGL.
I think the story makes it easy to confuse AIX and A/UX by mentioning both of them.
The latest A/UX compatible device I found is this one:
https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Macintosh_Quadra_950
Do you know of any Mac 68k hardware with OpenGL support?
I think Doom is used as a right of passage, but I agree it’s been done so many times that Doom looses points on originality. Quake 1 for DOS didn’t use opengl, but more often than not quake 2 seems to be the game of choice for porting & tech demos.
I’d be more impressed if someone took a modern game and rebuilt it to run on old 90s hardware. It would be an interesting take on what we technically could have had back then using newer ideas. This would be a bigger challenge and a lot more work though, but it would break out of the “yet another doom clone” mold.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S2RCGctOxsw
Engine is looking good, not sure if he has implemented AI yet…
leech,
Haha, yeah I’m not surprised. The original code is unplayable at that speed, although it looks like the same developer built what looks like a better engine for the atari a few years earlier,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTxwfRl_I0U
So it ought to be possible with enough determination.
Personally I liked quake 1 better than quake 2 and every time I see a Q2 port (like Q2-RTX) I wish it were Q1.
Quake requires an FPU, which makes Doom more suitable for many more platforms, which probably in turn makes it a more standard choice for porting to obscure platforms.
Drumhellar,
That is an Interesting point and I think you are right about quake using floating point. It is conceivable that someone could convert it to purely integral math. There are a lot of tricks one can use but the real question would be one of performance especially because quake was already designed to push the boundaries of it’s time. I don’t know about quake’s code specifically but highly optimized x86 code could overlap FP and integral math to get more calculations done than using either alone.
Another possibility would be to port quake’s 3dfx voodoo graphics engine, which should be theoretically possible on any hardware that can support those PCI cards. It ought to work even on a modest CPU. Of course this would just be for bragging rights as very few people would be able to use it, haha.
I can think back to a lot of other games I’d like to see this done to, but considering their source code was never published it rules out most titles in existence unless we’re talking a complete rewrite.
Also with proprietary games legal challenges can stop a project even if non of the original code or art is used as was the case when blizzard shut down freecraft.
https://www.the-nextlevel.com/tnl/threads/20358-Blizzard-shuts-down-Freecraft
Xenix has had a Doom port since about a year already so… late to the party.
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2021/10/26/zeedoom-xenix/
https://github.com/gattilorenz/Xenix-doom