A closer look at the Super NES DOOM Source Code Release | MVG 

Corrections: <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="157">2:37</a> - Gran Turismo 2, not 3

Imagine Randy pulling up at ID Software like: "Ayyyyy i have a complete port of Doom for the SNES and it actually runs, pretty cool huh? wanna release it or what?"

This guy is a legitimate genius. Writes his own dev tools to make the impossible game, what an amazing talent.

Fun fact: Bleem's case set a precedent and it's because that precedent you can use and develop emulators legally nowdays. Don't know if that's what they wanted or not, but Bleem went out of business to save the emulation community.

So Doom on the SNES was the orginal "Can it run doom" Proof of concept?

No devkit, no engine, extremely weak hardware. Randy Liden total legend.

"Its not about the quality of the port, its about flexing your coding skills"

Developers in the 90s: I ported the most significant game of the year to a 16 bit console with a custom built engine a chip and a piece of paper Developers now: buy better PC.

As a teenager in the 90's, I can confirm that this cartridge was a blast. Yes, very underwhelming compared to the PC version, but for most of the kids of that era, that didn't had access to computers, the Snes port was a blast to play. It looked great, because anything 3d related to 16bit consoles were impressive.

I played this on XBAND back in the day. Once I remember being terrified when I ended up face-to-face with my opponent while unarmed only to realize that he wasn't actually facing me, since the engine does not draw any other angles for enemies. They are always rendered facing you even if the other player is looking somewhere else!

I usually don't use the word "genius" loosely, but this guy is for sure a genius programmer and engineer too to be able to make his own devkit, and everything from scratch, this require some badass skills. Im in awe, plain and simple. Thanks for sharing this story MVG, i had no clues of all the secrets behind this incredible port.

This channel is basically another hidden gem on RU-vid. Your content is always very unique and interesting.

"bleem would win on all counts but it forced them out of business" just the idea of that happening seems so obvious that the justice system can be abused. great video as always.

I will never forget when I was a little kid probably around 8? years old the first time seeing Doom on my neighbor's computer was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life. I remember later on when I had it for SNES that I preferred the PC version on my neighbor's computer because when you picked up the shotgun he smiled, which he didn't do on the SNES.

am I understanding correctly that he wasn't given the source code for DOOM and had to basically write his own engine from scratch that played like it?

@<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="597">9:57</a> The reason the SinTable has **1280 entries** instead of the usual 1024 entries (360°) is because the Sin and Cos table **share common data.** The CosTable starts at offset 90° because Randal made use of the Trigonometric identity: _cos(x) = sin(x + 90°)_ A normal sin table has 360° divided into 1024 sub-divisions but since cos starts at offset 90° we need **an extra 90°** worth of data. Thus, 1024 + 90/360*1024 = 1024 + 256 = 1280 entries. It is created via DOOM-FX/source/mksin.c

"no source code, no problem! I can make my own!" the moto of this hero.

This is a testament to the "if you want to, you can do it" Very impressive

I absolutely loved doom on SNES and never ever complained about the frame rate.

When a friend of mine showed me this game on the SNES, I thought it looked/ was crap. Faster-forward ~25 years and now a software developer. I think it is seriously impressive! Funny how perspective changes... 🤔

Randy Linden the unsung hero, or at least the one who dared to challenge. The other Randy, however...

If you change the oscillator clock crystal for the SuperFX 2 chip on the cart to around 27Mhz, the performance is way better and there is little to no input lag on the game. You can actually do that with the real cart without changing or altering the SNES itself. I honestly think you should try it and make a video on your findings. Good work, like usual.

This Randy Linden guy was clearly pretty much a genius. Also, this is probably one of the best gaming related channels, if not the best currently.

I remember back in the day having to run doom on the smallest window size possible because my slow 386sx @ 16mhz wasn't able to handle it at all

Growing up in a home without PCs, my first experience with Doom was on the Sega 32X hehe

I really really hope the early version of doom for the saturn gets leaked, was changed as even though it had a smooth frame rate carmack did not like Texture warping....and we got the port we did

me: "Finally I can print text to console with my RSS 232" Linden: "That's cute" *Also Linden: develop doom on a dishwasher*

They were like: We'll leave you here in the middle of the desert. Here are all the parts you need to make a working car to go back, but none of them fit together and we won't explain how they work, good luck.

This video was too short which is a clear sign of me enjoying it. My hope for the scene actually is that they get SNES Mouse support to work, I think way too few games actually have support for it (I'm looking at you, SimCity!).

I first heard of Randy Linden when I was researching Bleem. The guy is a legend. Ironically, I believe he went on to work for Sony for a bit after Bleemcast. I think some people mix up/assume that Doom on SNES supports the mouse because of Wolfenstein's support for it. Great video as usual and thanks for the shout-out.

I think the SNES version of Doom is the only game I ever returned to a store! I'd played the PC version at a friends house and bought a SNES copy for myself, but the tiny window and poor framerate made me return it. It's great to understand that it was a technical marvel, but.... it's not a good game to play. Still fascinating though!

There are very few YT channels that make me this happy when I see a new upload. I never thought I’d enjoy watching mini-docs on YT, but MVG does such a great job of making his vids interesting and professional, and they keep my attention the whole time.

I overclocked my SNES cartridge with an oszilator! The framerate is improved a little bit

Linden isn't just a great programmer, he's a hero to the emulation community and video game historians alike.

Videos like this are nothing short of GOLD to me. As a retro gamer who grew up on Doom and also a software developer and sysadmin who has a lifelong passion for computing since age 5, you can't get much better content than this. Thank you!!

Even as someone who doesn't understand programming very well (tried my hand at a game making course and didn't do so well) I always like how you make your videos and explain them, and your passion is heard in everything. Thank you for your work MVG!

Nice! Fantastic content man, honestly really enjoy all of your videos.

This code is so insanely clean, yandere dev could learn something from this.

glad this popped up in my reccomended feed! subscribed, and im gonna binge watch your videos now. cheers!

This is one hell of an achievement and, as you so aptly put it, needs to be preserved. Awesome video, thanks for the closer look at the code.

Hey wait, wasn't the DOOM SNES cart red? EDIT: oooo the PAL version wasn't. Neat.

Man you really make some of the best videos. I am part of the Tribes Revengeance community and we have modded and tweaked the game fairly heavily over the years to keep it up to date with modern computers and to add lots of features that make the multiplayer more balanced for today's super experienced and advanced players. The game came with a level editor and is more open to modding and editing than many games, so it's nice to see that the thought was there since, and this is a whole separate topic, but games that are developed with community asset creation and modding in mind are almost always better games in the long run because the community forms around it and makes all sorts of awesome content and tweaks long after the devs are done with it (the most successful example was probably CS 1.6 which was a free mod originally and for over 6 years was the most popular multiplayer online game outright). The one thing that still really bothers me about Tribes Vengeance that the community hasn't figured out yet is the view or fogging distance. This game takes place at such a high speed and over such great distances because of the skill level of today's players, often somebody will go from being totally not visible from fog to at your flag stand and then gone to the other side of the map and if you aren't watching your radar you really only get a second or two from when they leave the fog to when they get your flag and if you could only increase the view / fog distance in my opinion it would make it almost a perfect game for what it is. Obviously the limitation was put in place because back when the game was made computers just didn't have the power to render that far smoothly. I don't know if maybe you can help us Modern Vintage Gamer, but the source code was never released and from what I've heard it will take source code to increase the view distance. Aren't there tools out there now that decompile games? And the hard part is just naming all of the functions to be descriptive since the decompiler can't do that yet? If there is any way you could help us figure this out, that would be so awesome. There are lots of T:V videos on my channel if you want to see some of the action and if anybody wants to join us you can download the game for free at tribesrevengeance.net Thanks MVG! Keep up the awesome content.

When he said limitations of bandwidth at <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="717">11:57</a> my internet legit cut out for a few seconds and I thought it was an editing trick, then I realised I just fooled myself.

This is a fantastic video. Bravo for covering this so thoroughly!

am I the only one that has a habit of coming to this channel every monday? Watching MVG on mondays has pretty much become a routine. 🤘

Further pushing DOOM's release on EVERYTHING. Can't wait to run it on my smart fridge!

Modern Vintage Gamer, you have finally made Monday morning worth getting up for. I get out of bed so much faster knowing there's a new upload.

Hey sir, there's not one single day that I come to see your videos that I can't learn a lot. Thanks for the good work!

461k subscribers! - I remember discovering this channel at 20k. Before that I remember using your emulators on OG Xbox. Well done man, much love.

At this rate I'm starting to get suspicious that someone's uncle is actually working at Nintendo

Awesome and interesting coverage as always MVG. Thank you.

Great video as always, and that CAVE tshirt is OP :)

I’m actually very intrigued by this. The snes is one of my favorite consoles and the Snes version despite being not the best version is one of the most technically impressive ports and I love crazy impressive ports

I first played doom on the PS1 but 2 years later got to try the snes version and was impressed with what it could do and it was my fist time hearing what the PC style music was like, it was a big surprise and the only other time I got a surprise was when I heard the Japanese Opening for Fist of the North Star as it was a completely different tone.

I played Doom in SNES long time ago, I remember until today hpw it felt when 2 baros appeard as the bosses of first level. Challenger levels and that powerful music marked my teenage. Thank you mr Linden! Thank you Vintage Gamer for this nice video!

I like how you professionally narrate the video. You really know your stuff, and it's wonderful to see. Instant sub. Cheers

"And then there's the developer that makes the impossible happen" If you think *this* is impossible, wait till you hear about the utter horror story that was DOOM 3DO.

My first time really playing through Doom was the SNES version. I had played a little bit of Doom 2 on the PC already, but I was just messing around playing one or two levels with some cheat codes while I was at my dad's office. As far as sitting down and playing through the game properly, the SNES version was how I did it. I don't think people properly acknowledge how truly important this port was. Back then, it was almost impossible to find someone with a PC in their house, especially a PC capable of playing Doom. You couldn't buy computers or PC games at a place like wal-mart. Talk to anyone from this era and they will all tell you about how the first time they got to play Doom or Quake was at their college, or at someone's work. Getting to play a game like this was NOT something the average person could do. For most gamers, their introduction to Doom came through console ports on the SNES, Saturn, and PS1. These were not just impressive achievements, but they were also a big reason why PC gaming is even a thing today.

Your videos are always fantastic!

Excellent teardown of the code, great video thanks!!

Doom for the SNES had fully working mouse support. I own an official SNES mouse and i've played it before on my copy of doom and it's nearly identical to mouse control from the DOS, so very hard to control. Also, the game forgot to implement a way to actually get past the menu with the mouse, so either you wait it out or you can only play E1M1. it's really broken.

I appreciated owning this game as a 15 year old. Yes it was sluggish and yes the graphics weren’t perfect but I still loved it. No1 mentions the music on the snes version of doom but it was the one thing that made it stand out from other versions imo. Nice video!

I Just love all your vids man, always interesting and great production value! Thank You!

This guy is pretty breathtaking. Wow. Thank you for this video and making the importance and genius of its code easy to understand. Great video as always, MVG!

Hi MVG! The SNES Doom port is also quite infamously known for not having cheats. However @<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="505">8:25</a> when you're talking about the Superscope support, you can also see a line referring to cheat codes right below. This really confuses me, so I was hoping that you had an explanation to this. Maybe cheats were intended to be present but the lack of space didn't allow for them to be there? Or is there any other explanation that makes more sense? As usual, great video. Thanks and have a good one!

I remember renting DOOM for the SNES. The cartridge was red which was awesome.

Love your work MVG. Thank you for your entertaining videos!

I love the level of detail you go into in video's MVG

Some Guy 1999:able to make a pc run ps1 games Sony 2020: "You crazy Jollyboy its too hard"

Using a lookup table for trigonomic functions was quite common back in the day. I've used it myself when making a demo, although I generated the data on startup to save bytes. Also, to make it even faster I translated it all to 256 degrees, which was plenty of resolution for what I needed.

I love the amount of work and effort you put into these videos, especially when you dive into the code. Keep it up man!

Awesome content, absolutely love mvg channel !

So let me get this straight: this ONE MAN ported one of the most influential games of all time to vastly inferior hardware, using an engine which was built from the ground up in one of the most notoriously difficult programming languages, without ANY of the original source code, and did it all with a homemade devkit? Holy. Fucking. Shit. I'm in genuine awe. I'm struggling to believe it all

I'm curious why you didn't reach out to the developer to get answers to many of the questions and ponderings you had throughout the video.

this video is shockingly short for this amazing content. I was sad to see the end so soon man. Good stuff.

Very cool video - thanks for the look under the hood!

This was my first experience of Doom and i enjoyed it despite the framerate and pixelate aspect, i really enjoyed it that much. And for the other port i think it was the most faithful experience from PC, Ps1, Jaguar and 32X port lack OG texture and style of map. The mood is here too.

Experience with a weird accessory? That sounds like you need Stop Skeletons from Fighting.

Outstanding stuff as always. I will never let my MGS Bleemcast go, its a work of art.

When you said it was assembly I thought it would be impossible to read, but that code looks extremely well documented and organized! I might have to take a look.

This makes me wonder what Doom would be like on the Genesis with the SVP chip used in Virtua Racing.

when inquisitive programming mind, that equals Carmack's, asks for a challenge - build your own devkit just for fun and port a game or two in assembler, instead of high level bloatware. i appreciate [bows]

From someone who loves Doom and played the snot out of it on the SNES as a kid, I thank you for this vid. Really enjoyed how my fav game was made to work on my fav console.

I'm still suprised that some is making vidoes on such topics. But I am surely glad. An amazing feat of engineering. These kinds of thinkgs inspire my daily work.

Dude I literally just downloaded snes9gx for my modded wii and played the SNES port of doom. Perfect timing my dude

I was surprised to hear the mention of "Metal Combat" in this episode. I'm glad: It was one of the best games on the SNES, despite its limited scope. A detail-oriented boss rush shooter, it was extremely fun and even managed to include an asymmetrical 2-player mode.

Amazing video, I always think about how they did it in some way, and you explain it very well - Congratulations.

Wow! Awesome video! Nice production skills. They're almost Randy Lindon level of leanness. 😂

That source code is a legitimate piece of art, IMO

I remember when that port came out there were rumors that the cartridge contained some extra chips that made running Doom possible :-)

i absolutely LOVE this video and keep coming back to it

Awesome music and awesome video! Can't wait to see this code running on my future internet enabled toaster LOL! Keep up the great content and thank you!

Coding and Doom. This be a good day.

In case anyone wondering whats the banger song in the intro: Doom OST - E1M4 - "Kitchen Ace (And Taking Names)" SNES version

Impressive port! Thanks for covering this.

Awesome video! Loved it. Never heard of Randy Linden

BEGIN THE REALITY ENGINE PORTS OF OTHER ID TECH 1 GAMES!

The music that plays at <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="805">13:25</a> is called Suspence. Doom 3do has an amazing version of this track, doom 3do might have been a rushed port but the music in that game is superior to all other doom versions. Check it out. It was literally made by the ceo of art data who published the game, guy was in a band so they made the music for the game

Awesome video. Using Sin, Cos, and Tan tables are very common for that time. I remember Wolfenstein 3D uses these tables for the same reasons (Not everyone has a math-coprocessor :)

Another great video. Greetings from Poland!