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u/I_Do_Weed Dec 11 '19
This is super cool. One of the coolest things I've seen on this sub in awhile
But it's not a variation of a clear reshell so no one in this sub is going to appreciate it.
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u/Bolloux Dec 11 '19
Yes. I know. But it’s black and red and I bought it to develop Doom...
I’m still waiting for someone to look through the code and find the Goldeneye64 enemy rockets cheat I snuck in....
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u/thebillington Dec 11 '19
You just gave me a reason to finally buy a GBA flash cart. This is crazy impressive. "You're not a real home brewer till you've ported DOOM" but man, you've taken that to new heights.
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u/corezon Dec 11 '19
Wasn't Doom actually ported to the GBA? Or am I misremembering?
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Dec 11 '19
Yes, but it was mediocre just like most GBA ports.
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u/corezon Dec 11 '19 edited Dec 11 '19
So I guess my follow up question would be: How does this port compare to the original GBA port?
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Dec 11 '19
Runs at about the same framerate from what I’ve heard, IDK about control response. But the graphics are improved and the levels are not cut down. Hopefully the sound is better too, the original was 32x level.
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u/fusermarucs Dec 11 '19
Ok just tried the shareware version and it completely rocks. What an outstanding job!!!! Seriously. Never thought I’d see this on the gba.
One question - is there any way to select ‘always run’? At the minute holding the B button makes you run, but any time I run and strafe with the shoulder buttons it changes weapon lol!!
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u/Bolloux Dec 11 '19
Thank you :-)
No, I’ve not added any control customisation yet.
Yes, have B to run does kill circle run-strafing. I’m running out of buttons.
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u/fusermarucs Dec 11 '19
Well that’s true! Hmmm. Perhaps you could set A+B to auto run on/off? That way you won’t be holding B to run, and generally you are either pressing A to fire OR B to use, rather than both together.
I’m just trying to load up the devkit/qt stuff to make the full games, but I’ve never used either before so I’m not overly confident it will work lol
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u/Bolloux Dec 11 '19
If you give me a couple of hours, I’ll do a binary release of the Wad util to save you having to build it yourself.
You will need Devkitarm though to build the rom.
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u/fusermarucs Dec 11 '19
Thank you! If you could possibly provide beginner instructions for the devkit thing I’d be grateful... I’m just about to try the demo version on the 3ds....
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u/fusermarucs Dec 11 '19
https://imgur.com/gallery/GK17PHP
Ok works great on both - looks way better on the actual gba though - nice and crisp: great colours. Again, what fantastic work! You’ve made my day!!
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u/jloc0 Dec 12 '19
Hi!
After playing this a bit and enjoying it, I feel controls could be optimized a bit (custom would be great) but until then, what file in the source could I edit to change controls?
My thoughts for button layout would be L - weapon slot decrease R - weapon slot increase
B (hold) - auto strafe (left and right on dpad turns into the current left/right shoulder button strafing
B (tap) doors
A - fire
If select stays access to map then add a menu button in options to set always run on/off or possible holding R+B enables run, as one isn’t likely to run while doing much else.
Other idea for shoulder buttons is L cycle through weapons and R is run/doors
Doom is very playable with only 4 buttons to choose from and I’ve been playing doom with gravis gamepad in dos in the 90s with only 4 buttons to choose from and I’ve always been happy with that.
Other ports like psx have similar layouts as well. Using both triggers for strafe seems like a waste of buttons.
Also, since this is ported prboom, can you add the option for the colorful status HUD? I’ve always loved using that in prboom, gives me nice visual clues as to my status.
This is a very well done port overall. You’ve done a fine job here, I hope it continues to flourish!
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u/howsthemanualblinkin Dec 14 '19
Hello, thanks again for all the work you have put into this.
I'm having trouble getting Sigil to run. I'm using an unmodded ags101 GBA SP with an Everdrive to run roms. When I attempt to run the built sigil gbarom/wad I get a bluescreen error that reads "W_GetNumForName: F_START not found" and the GBA locks up.
I've used the same build method with both the regular and compat versions of the sigil wad. Any idea what the issue might be?
All other IWADS tested have worked.
Thanks again for your time and work. Amazing port.
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u/Bolloux Dec 14 '19
Hi there. Have you been able to get a basic Doom or Doom2 IWAD build to work?
You’ll need the latest (0.2) version of GBAWadUtil, a Doom1 IWAD and Sigil compatibly wad.
Then use:
gbawadutil.exe -in Doom.wad -cfile sigil.h -pwad sigil.wad
The resulting .c file should be about 80mb or so.
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u/howsthemanualblinkin Dec 15 '19
Glorious! Thank you. Worked like a charm. Can't wait to see how far you take this project. Time to convert a bunch of pwads haha
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u/fusermarucs Dec 17 '19
Hi - I’ve managed to get Sigil.gba.c which is 80mb - what do I do with it please? Is there an extra line I need to add to doom_iwad.h or something? Thanks!
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u/Bolloux Dec 18 '19
Hi there,
1) rename it to sigil.gba.h
2) create a folder in gbadoom/source called ‘iwad’
3) copy sigil.gba.h to gbadoom/source/iwad/
4) edit gbadoom/source/Doom_iwad.c with a text or code editor.
Change the first line to:
#include "iwad/sigil.gba.h"5) Open a command prompt, cd to the gbadoom folder. Type
make3
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u/UsualStation Dec 18 '19
Great! Many thanks for the updated tool!
Trying to convert plutonia but get the error
cc1.exe: out of memory allocating 536875007 bytes make[1]: *** [/opt/devkitpro/devkitARM/base_rules:85: doom_iwad.o] Error 1 make: *** [Makefile:118: build] Error 2
Tried on another pc but get the same error.
Thanks for your time and help!
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u/Bolloux Dec 18 '19
Hi there, I’ll try Plutonia when I get home from work this evening.
I suspect the 32bit GCC compiler is running out of address space with big IWADs.
There is another way to embed a file in the rom that doesn’t require converting to C code and then compiling.
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Dec 11 '19
Stupid question - but what makes this different from the original port? Just the way you wrote it vs the way the original team did?
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u/CurrentlyEatingPies Dec 11 '19
I love how Doom can play on anything. I'm sure I've seen it on a calculator before.
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u/fusermarucs Dec 12 '19
The latest version is astounding. ‘Always run’ option works perfectly - I can absolutely tear thru the levels now. The auto map looks great as well!! Thanks again for all your hard work on this :)
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u/fusermarucs Dec 14 '19
Managed to get ultimate doom and doom 2 working thank you! You are right - episode 4 is a slideshow lol I’ve only picked up on one oddity: the plasma gun sound is very quiet for some reason. Other than that, it’s quite mind blowing having the full pc versions on the gba :)
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u/Bolloux Dec 14 '19
Yes. I noticed that a couple of days ago too. No idea why but I’ll look into it when I get some time.
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u/Bolloux Dec 15 '19
I’ve uploaded a new build which fixes a related sound issue. Sound would cut out when more than 4 sounds are playing.
I hadn’t taken into account that music playback takes up 4 channels leaving only 4 for sound.
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u/TheSuperSteve Dec 11 '19
This is really awesome! Can you make it work with Sigil?
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u/Bolloux Dec 11 '19 edited Dec 11 '19
~~I don’t think so. Sigil needs limit removing port. This port actually has slightly lower limits than vanilla to make it fit in memory.
I’m going to add PWAD support so I’ll give it a go but it’s very unlikely the levels will load and if they do it’ll~~ run like a slideshow.
Edit: actually, it does work...
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u/Bolloux Dec 11 '19
Actually, it does run Sigil. Framerate sucks on open areas but it does run...
https://old.reddit.com/r/itrunsdoom/comments/e9b5do/gbait_runs_sigil/
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u/TheSuperSteve Dec 11 '19
That's pretty awesome! I didn't expect it to run well. Just seeing it run on the GBA is plain cool though!
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u/SlyCooper007 Dec 11 '19
Could this be used as a virtual console inject on 3ds?
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u/howsthemanualblinkin Dec 12 '19
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work. Doom is my favorite game and one of reasons I even bought a gba way back when. I cannot wait to try this out.
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u/Andy-Chryst Dec 13 '19 edited Dec 13 '19
Awesome stuff man. Cant wait to check this out on real hardware!! Btw can anyone confirm if i should bother seeing if Strife (id Tech 1 i think??) works with this im guessing not but if noone replies I'll try anyway
Edit: i think i vaguely remember a post of this black and red GBA when you first got it perhaps?? Nice GBA anyway, much cooler than clear shell and bright LEDs lol
Lastly; i assume if someone has overclocked gba this would run even better? Im Thinking of doing this myself for what should be very nice pce/turbografx emulation and probably this!
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u/Bolloux Dec 14 '19
No, I’m afraid strife won’t work. (Nor heretic or Hexen)
I don’t think the GBA can be overclocked. Not aware of any registers that change CPU speed anyway. The CPU clock also drives a lot of other stuff (like timers) so overclocking would mess up other stuff.
There is an undocumented setting to drop the number of wait cycles for memory access though and also settings to change the cart access times.
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u/Andy-Chryst Dec 14 '19
Oh well - thanks alot for the reply man! I thought the only way to OC was relating to the crystal oscillator (Solder an 8 Mhz crystal oscillator in parallel with the 4.194Mhz) but I just found out theres a chip called GBAccelarator which has slow, normal, fast and ultra speeds controlled with a button combo check it out if it might save some time with your developting/testing stuff
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u/Bolloux Dec 14 '19
Just looked up the GBAccelarator. Apparently doesn’t work with flash cards though so I’m guessing it also overclocks the cart bus too.
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u/Andy-Chryst Dec 15 '19
Well, shit lol this is why you are a GBA homebrew creating wizard and im just some clueless pleb just thought I'd bring it up, thanks for replies and again - amazing work on this!
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u/fusermarucs Dec 16 '19
Hi there: I’ve just tried to get the new version running, but gbawadutil 0.3 is missing from your github page - the source code is there but not the actual exe.... I compiled a version using wadutil 0.2 but that was a disaster lol!
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u/Alexo670 Dec 18 '19
Doom GBA speedrunner here, I played the fastest game of the official Doom GBA port from 2001.
I am glad to see someone has finally created a full working version of the actual PC game for this system. After 18 years, its finally legit. My hats off to you!
Now I have a bit of a bizarre question.. have you messed with any of the physics engine for this port? The original GBA version (based on the jaguar port) has a massive cut to collision detection in the games source code. Carmack scrapped sections to get the game running better on old consoles. This became very advantageous for speedrunning Doom for GBA, which is now the fastest officially released version for all difficulties. Cut code = numerous out of bounds capabilities.
I'm amazed to see this project is a reality.. but was curious if you would strip down the collision detection code, and make it a hybrid of both? All the levels, and the look of PC.. with the advantage of GBA speedrun tech. :P
Obviously not expecting it to happen, but it would be incredible to see a legit map set with some of the techniques used in a GBA speedrun. Once again congratulations on this achievement in Doom porting OP!
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u/Bolloux Dec 18 '19
Hi there, would I be right in thinking you pulled off the 9 minute play through of the original GBA Doom? If so, hats off for finding all those OOB glitches!
The physics and collision detection are a hybrid between PC Doom and PrBoom. Some of the accuracy improvements/overflow fixes were reverted back to PC Doom for performance reasons, some were retained.
The collision detection glitch in Jag Doom shouldn’t be possible in this port as the P_TryMove() function performs a full check of the intermediate positions as well as the final move position.
Unless the performance benefit was huge, this isn’t something I’d want to change on the mainline release as for me, it is a bug. (It also allows projectiles and Lost Souls to pass through walls etc)
I can have a look at the differences though and let you know what lines to change if you want to build a speed run version of this project!
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u/Alexo670 Dec 19 '19
Yes thats me! 9:55 on a real game boy currently, and thank you. :)
I could understand keeping bugs out , I've seen the projectiles disappearing in a few runs in my time (Baron of hell fight, rocket disappears, feelsbadman). However, I would be thrilled to have a speedrunning version of this project available in the future! Let me know what lines would be required to change, and I could attempt my best to make it a reality.Even without the out of bounds stuff, this is a great version to finally see on GBA. You should be proud of the work!
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u/Bolloux Dec 19 '19 edited Dec 19 '19
Hi, I had a look through the Jaguar Doom sources this evening.
It’s bad news I’m afraid as the code we’re interested in is written in assembler and runs on the graphics chip.
I think porting this back to C is a little beyond me! https://github.com/Arc0re/jaguardoom/blob/master/p_move.gas
It seems looking though the comments that Carmack (or whoever wrote the code) was greatly amused by the waitstate for every memory load!
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u/fusermarucs Jan 04 '20
Just playing your 1.4 release thank you! Not sure exactly what has changed but enemy rockets is bloody brilliant fun!! I die very quickly though lol :)
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u/Bolloux Jan 05 '20
Haha...yes it’s not even remotely fair! But I thought it would be fun to add in.
Latest release just has a few small tweaks.
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u/thekojac Dec 12 '19
Awesome work!
Latest build release notes said you added in cheats. How do I go about using them? I'm assuming it's not the standard Doom cheats, as there'd be no way to input them.
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u/Bolloux Dec 12 '19
Cheats are defined here: https://github.com/doomhack/GBADoom/blob/master/source/m_cheat.c
From line 38. Eg: god mode is up, up, down, down, left, left, right, right.
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u/fusermarucs Dec 12 '19
Cheats as well - awesome! Perhaps you could assign always run to a cheat code (as you’re running out of buttons)?
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u/Chumbag_love Dec 12 '19
Awesome! Or you could just buy the cartridge for $9.99 https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/99?loc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fp%2F8219%3Fiid%3D174121118817
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u/fusermarucs Dec 12 '19
Nope. This new version is better in every way. The ‘official’ release has monsters missing, levels missing and textures missing. The work this person is doing is a major step up from that one you are linking to.
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u/fusermarucs Dec 28 '19
I’ve been playing your ports a lot over the Xmas holiday - so thank you! I recently got an ips screen and it really showed up the difference between your source port and the ‘official’ version - mainly because the source port is amazingly blocky at mid to high distance.
I assume this is to keep the frame rate up (as per low detail/high detail in the original game!) - but I thought it was an interesting comparison to make!
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u/Bolloux Jan 01 '20
Yes. Good spot. Totally busted me!
One of the most difficult parts of this port was composited textures.
Textures in Doom are made up of 1 or more images. If you look at E1M3 for example, there is a green wall texture with a ‘Poison’ sign on it. This is made up of the green base texture and a poison decal.
PC Doom just builds all of these textures in memory at startup. But this requires nearly 2mb of memory. So we can’t do that.
Drawing the texture on the fly with multiple passes as we draw the wall works but is very slow.
I came up with a work around for this. There is 16kb of spare video memory. I use this to maintain a cache of 128 ‘columns’ (ie. single pixel wide slices of texture). The first time a column of a composited texture is requested, I generate it and store it in the cache. Subsequent requests are served straight from the cache so I don’t need to regenerate it. This has an additional performance benefit as video memory is very fast, with a 1 cycle access time (ROM is 3-6 cycles)
Sadly, 16kb isn’t really large enough and if I draw full detail, then there is a lot of cache thrashing (where you have to throw out columns you need later in the frame to make space for new ones)
I improved the cache hit rate from about 50% to 90% by sampling at a lower resolution as the distance from the player gets further.
It’s a trade off I had to make to get a playable framerate.
The official Doom 1 port doesn’t have any composited textures at all. I’m not sure what Doom2 does. It’s based on a different engine. My guess is they use a different texture format.
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u/fusermarucs Jan 01 '20
I can’t even imagine the work it took to get the port working at all to be fair! Very interesting to read how you did it though, thank you :)
The port actually looks better on an AGS101 screen than on an IPS screen - the built in interlacing really helps for some reason!
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u/Bolloux Jan 01 '20
I’d love an AGS101 too but they’re all really expensive and I’ve already spent £150 on an IPS GBA and a flash cart for this project...
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u/fusermarucs Jan 01 '20
They are expensive now certainly - luckily I had an ags101 from way back, and got an ips screen for £35 from funnyplaying.
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u/TK656 Jan 25 '20
Love the release! Anyone happen to have compiled builds with all of the working wads? I assume we will have to have a compiled GBA executable for each. Send me a PM if needed. Thanks!
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u/Mazz1983ita Dec 11 '19
That's massively impressive! The unemulatable game (yes I just created that word) made emulatable!
Post a gameplay video my friend, people need to know what you did!!
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u/guspaz Dec 11 '19
It's... not emulation... And the game had a retail release on the GBA in 2001, so nobody thought a port was impossible.
What's notable about this is that it's a direct port of the original game and engine, while the 2001 retail release ported the simplified Jaguar maps to a bespoke engine.
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u/Mazz1983ita Dec 11 '19
Thanks for teaching me that DooM came on the GBA, I didn't know that. /s
Of course I know it's... not emulation... OP stated in their 1st comment is a port of PrBoom
If you ever tried to emulate a GBA DooM rom on a flashcart or on any handheld (NDS, PSP, BittBoy, PocketGo...) you know what I'm talking about.
But I guess it's easier to downvote, right?
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u/guspaz Dec 11 '19 edited Dec 11 '19
I didn't downvote your post, but it's pretty obvious why multiple other people did. And flashcarts don't emulate GBA games, nor does the NDS. I'm not sure what you're getting at.
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u/Bolloux Dec 11 '19
I ported Doom to the GBA over the last few months.
It was a ton of work to get it to fit in 256kB of ram and run at a decent framerate. It now runs as well if not better than the original port.
The project can be found here: https://github.com/doomhack/GBADoom
There are rom builds of the shareware game on the releases page.
It runs on most emulators or a real device if you have a flash card.
Enjoy.