DOOM Developed on NeXT Hardware and Software

DOOM, one of the most popular games in history was developed on NeXT hardware and software.

http://romero.smugmug.com/gallery/480/1/14486

Early versions of Quake were created on NeXTSTEP too.

http://romero.smugmug.com/gallery/480/1/14485

Intrestingly it seems that at some point id software commisioned a company which I think is Omni to write NEXTSTEP drivers for the Rendition Verite 3d chipset, not sure if this was for i386 or HP-PA.

It's mentioned here:

http://www.stepwise.com/PR/981007-01.html

And here in this thread

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.advocacy/browse_thread/thread/346ba3974cad915f/46eb9a92fc6d59c9?lnk=st&q=verite+group%3Acomp.sys.next.*&rnum=1&hl=en#46eb9a92fc6d59c9

brams

This is true and the ethernet traffic was very nasty. Their UDP packets were not friendly at that time.
I played Doom on a pair of 040 NeXTcube (one with Dimension the other one BW) that was located on a separate labs, and the network traffic brought down the whole 10 mbps coax network of the building.

This is circa 1993, when I was a grad student at U of Texas Austin.

Paulus (a new member, and still on a NeXT color turbo station)

It's fun to play this on the NeXT but I have to say that 1.) it runs a little chuncky and 2.) it's a little rough to play with no sound.  But, none the less its pretty cool to play and I would suggest you try it out.

Quote from: "brams"It's mentioned here:

http://www.stepwise.com/PR/981007-01.html

Funny, I just finished a quick run through on Quake II on my PowerMac 8600/300 (playing during breaks over the last four days). I was getting about 32 fps on my system (using Omni's final build for Mac OS X Server).

Originally I had fired up the game to see if there was any noticeable difference after I put an ATI Rage 128 (16 MB) video card in the system... and then decided to play through to the end.

Sadly the only OpenGL drivers for Rhapsody are the MesaGL drivers which only work with VooDoo cards as I recall (it has been a while since the last time I checked into that). There is a nice comparison of Omni's version with the original Mac OS 8 release here (http://www.everythingmac.com/articles/quake2/page1/).

I had been trying out Final Doom: The Plutonia Experiment and Final Doom: TNT - Evilution, but hadn't gotten that far in them.

All told, I have the following Id games on my 8600:

Ultimate DOOM
DOOM II
Final Doom: The Plutonia Experiment
Final Doom: TNT - Evilution
Heretic
Quake II

There is nothing like a good first-person-shooter to take the edge off. ;)

Quote from: "dravier"It's fun to play this on the NeXT but I have to say that 1.) it runs a little chuncky and 2.) it's a little rough to play with no sound.  But, none the less its pretty cool to play and I would suggest you try it out.

You may be aware of this, but id did not write DOOM to *run* on NeXT, they wrote their world builder tools on NeXT.  The game was only ever intended to run on the PC, using hand-coded assembly routines which take advantage of a specific graphics mode on the PC.  This graphics mode is not available on the NeXT, making it much slower, plus the fact that they never bothered to optimize the graphics code.  NeXTdoom was really just something for fans of NeXT and DOOM.

I always thought it would be cool to port the DOOM engine to the i860 on the NeXTdimension board, where it could cache all of the graphics in a maxed-out 128 MB memory space.  Now that DOOM (sans audio code) is open sourced, this might be possible, except for the fact that it has never really been documented how to take over the NeXTdimension board with custom software (other than the Display PostScript Window Server that usually owns the board).

I guess DOOM is one of the most ported games ever, running on cell phones now, some even call it the new Hello World of programming.  Maybe somebody will put it on the NeXTdimension to see if it actually runs fast enough to play.

P.S.  The reason there is no audio is that id outsourced the audio engine, and did not own the rights to the source.  That's also why audio never made it into the open source release of DOOM.  I have worked on writing a Win32 sound engine for DOOM, one of many versions that were written at the time.  It might take a bit of work to get audio working on a NeXT, but I suppose it's possible...

Quote from: "Sound Consulting"

Quote from: "dravier"It's fun to play this on the NeXT but I have to say that 1.) it runs a little chuncky and 2.) it's a little rough to play with no sound.  But, none the less its pretty cool to play and I would suggest you try it out.

You may be aware of this, but id did not write DOOM to *run* on NeXT, they wrote their world builder tools on NeXT.  The game was only ever intended to run on the PC, using hand-coded assembly routines which take advantage of a specific graphics mode on the PC.  This graphics mode is not available on the NeXT, making it much slower, plus the fact that they never bothered to optimize the graphics code.  NeXTdoom was really just something for fans of NeXT and DOOM.

I always thought it would be cool to port the DOOM engine to the i860 on the NeXTdimension board, where it could cache all of the graphics in a maxed-out 128 MB memory space.  Now that DOOM (sans audio code) is open sourced, this might be possible, except for the fact that it has never really been documented how to take over the NeXTdimension board with custom software (other than the Display PostScript Window Server that usually owns the board).

I guess DOOM is one of the most ported games ever, running on cell phones now, some even call it the new Hello World of programming.  Maybe somebody will put it on the NeXTdimension to see if it actually runs fast enough to play.

P.S.  The reason there is no audio is that id outsourced the audio engine, and did not own the rights to the source.  That's also why audio never made it into the open source release of DOOM.  I have worked on writing a Win32 sound engine for DOOM, one of many versions that were written at the time.  It might take a bit of work to get audio working on a NeXT, but I suppose it's possible...

I also remember getting doom with audio running was something of a rarity (esp under OS/2)... IIRC wasnt there a news group alt.sex.doom.with.sound ?  Somehow that seems to sum up 1993 just about right.

That's weird, the one I downloaded from here (http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/next/applications/omni/omni_group.html) had sound. Are there two different NeXT ports of Doom or something?

   It's basically a slideshow on my grayscale 040-25 cube, but I guess I should've seen that coming.

Can you play it in a window?, iirc I used to play it on a Quadra 650 and it was ok played in a window, I think it was clunky as hell full screen at 640*480