Doom was THE first person shooter for a long time, even after Quake was released Doom was still holding its own with gamers.  Doom hit many platforms from the PC where it originated to less powerful consoles such as the Super Nintendo and even the Sega Saturn.  The Playstation versions were pretty darn good and exemplified what Doom was all about.  Unfortunately, the 3DO version of Doom was less than well received, or even wanted by the time it arrived.  There were problems left and right, more so than the Sega Saturn version (which was flawed quite badly too).  Now the source code has been made available for the 3DO port.

Rebecca Ann Heineman was the programmer responsible for the travesty that gamers came to know as Doom 3DO.  As you will read soon, it was not her fault as a looming deadline was solid as promises of a much improved version to work off of never materialized.  As we learned from the countless recounting of the Atari E.T. fiasco, these problems usually result in a bigger problem in the finished product.  Doom 3DO was no different.

Rebecca was handed the job of porting Doom to the 3DO in August of 1995 aiming for an October 1995 gold master release.  This was all in an attempt to meet the Christmas 1995 sales season.  As you can already see, time was simply not on Rebecca’s side here and having the people at 3DO begging for the port, it was just a recipe for disaster.

There were many parts of the game library that had to be rewritten or work around fixes had to be created.  The logos at the beginning was one such problem that was solved by new programs being created to handle them so that they could be dropped from memory.  This process, while eating precious time, allowed the 3DO to run Doom with the maximum amount of RAM available.

There is a ton more of information over at GitHub.com where Ms. Heineman has released the source code and additional details.

Source: Slashdot

Carl Williams

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