Released — MacDoom for SE/30

[MacOfAllTrades]

Git repo with readmes and the .sit file with all the good:https://github.com/retrospectmike/MacDoomSE30
(or direct Releases page: https://github.com/retrospectmike/MacDoomSE30/releases/tag/v1.0b2 )

Super excited to do this and wanted to start this thread to discuss technical details and feedback etc. I’ll make a post in the Marchintosh projects thread as well to get attention but wanted this to be the hub of discussion. I call it beta but it’s playable IMHO (but i’m biased..). Lots to discuss and unpack. Love you all for the support and this site and helping keep das lights blinkin’ on these old machines .

README.md in repo has lots of info, but PERFORMANCE_HISTORY.md and OPTIMIZATION_IDEAS.md document some of that. YES - I used Claude Code to get to this point plenty. Happy to talk about how that experience went and some of its tomfoolering (bad) and some of its booping (good) . The repo includes the claude.md in case folks want to run with it further on their own — happy to support that and see what the community can do with retro apps and AI.

I’m embracing trying out AI lately and in this case for use with Retro stuff I think it’s quite an experiment.


Ahhh been burnign some midnight oil to do this so I’m a little wired. Happy Marchintosh!!!
ALL FEEDBACK WELCOME!!!!!!!

 

[Paralel]

Does it support SE/30 internal grayscale?

 

[MacOfAllTrades]

Does it support SE/30 internal grayscale?

Not sure what this means so probably not? Graphics are dithered to true black and white only. You mean like for an XCEED card or whatnot?

 

[MacOfAllTrades]

Ha - i forgot to set the repo to public — it’s updated

 

[eric]

Once I saw the DOOM code was available I had hoped someone would look at it to even make the PPC/040 version more playable - this might be a good start in that direction as well with all build infra setup already. Looks fun, wish my SE/30 was booting

 

[rdmark]

Not sure what this means so probably not? Graphics are dithered to true black and white only. You mean like for an XCEED card or whatnot?

that's right, the Micron Xceed video card can output 8 bit (256 grays) video to the internal SE/30 monitor if hooked up with a special harness

 

[MacOfAllTrades]

Once I saw the DOOM code was available I had hoped someone would look at it to even make the PPC/040 version more playable - this might be a good start in that direction as well with all build infra setup already. Looks fun, wish my SE/30 was booting

Yea. I had to make the decision right at the start to either work with the leaked MacDoom source code from Lion entertainment or the open sourced Linux doom provided by id software. Ended up going with the latter but honestly I’d trust a lot could be done very quickly to optimize the Lion soft version very quickly especially with the help of AI tools. Claude models can can write 68k assembly. I’d trust Opus to write that more than Sonnet.

A lot of the work was instrumenting and testing and trying things out. When it works it’s great when it doesn’t it’s like How dumb can you be?! But such is AI. It reminds me of photoshop in the 90s. Replacing colors for you like it was nothing … but if you’re silly with it you’d come back with lens flares on everything . Which was the style at the time.

 

[twvd]

Awesome project! I'm a big Doom fan and it's cool I can finally run it on Snow Thanks for the shoutout

 

[MacOfAllTrades]

that's right, the Micron Xceed video card can output 8 bit (256 grays) video to the internal SE/30 monitor if hooked up with a special harness

Def won’t work out the box with the Xceed stuff mainly because built into the approach is a black and white dithering that happens in the rendering. But no doubt a grayscale replacement could be dropped in to die sample only to that.
It doesn’t use QuickDraw to do any of this so none of it comes for free code-wise. (I know QD can do that all for you but doesn’t apply here).

But AI wrote the b&w dithering in a few minutes so it’d be easy to get it to write a b&w approach. Easy enough to condition which based on an OS function call (i know that much from making my prev little project MacDock and handling color, grayscale , and b&w . )

the quality question would be interesting. And Se/30 with micron xceed isn’t any faster than a regular SE/30 so if converting to grayscale is more work than to b&w there’s yet another perf impact But maybe it’s less work! Idk.

also could pre-convert the wad file - this is the lowest hanging fruit for major impact right now in my se30 doom but I didn’t want to do that (and there were technical hurdles reported by the AI when we explored this., but that’s prob AI needing better guidance).

 

[MacOfAllTrades]

Awesome project! I'm a big Doom fan and it's cool I can finally run it on Snow Thanks for the shoutout

Thx! I take it your the/an author behind Snow??? If so thanks so much. That has been invaluable in accelerating dev of doomSE30. I was doing the 5-min transfer to real hardware for performance testing until you all hooked me up. Performance evaluation iteration speed skyrocketed and was like 90-95% accurate to hardware.
Snow also did NOT suffer from problems with 68k assembly code running that Basilisk failed at. For a while I could ONLY test something in Snow because Basilisk was showing some visual problems that were caused by its untrue way of emulating 68k assembly (IIRC). So can’t thank you and the Snow folks enough.