Released — MacDoom for SE/30

[MacOfAllTrades]

Ok fixed it!! i was writing directly to the video memory buffers but when trying to do this on newer-than-se/30 macs i was writing into addresses that weren’t reliably working.. somehow they worked in 32-bit addressing (via mode32) on my emulated Mac IIcx but not on 24-bit addressing. Anyway I got it sorted out.

Posted a v1.1.0 release just now. No real improvements for SE/30 but I got 256-bit color mode working for color macs, including 68030 color macs. The MacIIcx (emulated) is within noise of FPS/performance compared to the B&W Se/30. Color comes at a negative cost (i.e. a tiny gain in performance) because you save on dithering from color->B&W. All pretty much within noise - but color makes the low quality modes I made for the SE/30 look pretty bad — Simply because with color graphics you can see what you’ve done to the graphics more. But hey pick whatever of the 4 graphics quality modes you want. (Hi, Lo, Quad, Mush).

Hey if it gets Doom working on 68030 color macs that never had it before, it’s worth it.

Release v1.1.0 · retrospectmike/MacDoomSE30

1.1.0 Support for 256-color mode (requires a color Mac) Support for non-SE/30 machines in black & white, 256-colors, or 256-grays modes No full-screen option working yet

github.com

 

[MacOfAllTrades]

I’ve been very curious how performance of this doom port compares to the official Lion Entertainment release from the 90s. Unfortunately those do not support 68030 macs at all (and def. not black and white macs). And I don’t know of any good 68040 emulators that can faithfully reproduce performance (in the way that Snow awesomely faithfully reproduces 68030 performance close to real-world, at least in my experiments).

So the best I could do was use Snow emulating a Mac IIcx, then use WishIWere to pretend it’s a 68040 machine (I picked a quadra 650) so that the Lion version of Doom would run and I could compare performance. Then the Lion version doesn’t let me change the quality settings as low as I can on my port so it’s impossible to compare anything but the highest of settings or two. But the game is pretty unplayable at what I’ll call these Lion “retail doom” quality settings.

Of all the quality settings and tweaks, the biggest was probably a tie between turning OFF ceiling + floor textures and, less surprising, halving or quartering the number of rows and or columns that are being drawn (effectively dropping resolution). Plain black for floors and ceilings works pretty well generally visually, except for areas of toxic slime or lava which now you have very limited awareness of.

So from my seat-of-the-pants feel, MacDoom SE/30 runs significantly better on a 68030 with similar quality settings as the Lion port does. Lion port feels like it runs below 2 fps while MacDoom SE/30 on the same machine feels like it runs at 3-4 fps. Again - the better difference is that beyond running better, you can disable floor/ceiling textures as well as go into lower quality modes so that the game runs around 6-10fps which can really make the difference between non-playable and playable.

 

[eric]

I'm still seeing the same "lock up" Loading WAD file on my Q700 with doom1.wad