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This seems implausible at first: A 34 year old Unix-based platform with no previous Doom port. I spent a few minutes furiously googling this, pulling out all of
by tpmx 4y ago
This seems implausible at first: A 34 year old Unix-based platform with no previous Doom port. I spent a few minutes furiously googling this, pulling out all of my tricks. Nope. I couldn't find a previous port. Please someone else try it. There must be one, right? I want to live in universe that makes sense.
- hedgehog 4y agoIt makes a little more sense knowing that A/UX install media was hard to find for a long time, until recently (2021?) there were no compatible emulators, and a lot of the real hardware is probably too slow to run Doom or has too little memory to do the build.
- jandrese 4y agoAlso, the real hardware was both rare and fairly expensive so the community is further restricted. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Doom was never ported to stuff like TANDEM mainframes either.
- tpmx 4y agoAlso: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1340794861050605568 https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1340794861050605568 > AFAIK, nobody ever ported Doom to run on a Cray 1. The scalar CPU should be fast enough (in 1976!) to draw 320x200, but memory would be an issue because it wasn't byte addressable -- you could only load and store aligned 64 bit values, and a max of 1M elements would be a pinch. > You could burn instructions to shift and mask on the low order address bits, but a faster path would be to interleave 8 independent textures at different bit positions in the words, and have specialized texture mapping routines with a constant shift and mask. I don't recall ever considering that arrangement, but there may have been relevant consumer systems where doing it for 2 or 4 bit textures packed in bytes would have been helpful. > Figuring out how to best exploit chained vector instructions for texture mapping on the Cray would be phase two.
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoSo this would be like making Doom run entirely with SIMD instructions?
- jandrese 4y agoNot entirely, but it sounds like you might need to rewrite parts of it in a SIMD manner to make it performant. The memory thing might be an issue, but I remember Doom was ported to the SNES which only had 128kB of RAM and a 3.5Mhz CPU. While that was a heroic hack, it leaves a lot of possible overhead for a Crey-1 port with 1 million words addressable and an 80Mhz clock.
- classichasclass 4y agoWell ... not quite. SNES Doom had a co-processor (SuperFX) doing the work. Even with that it had a lot of compromises to work on the hardware.
- tadfisher 4y agoIt's also not really Doom, but an entirely different 3D engine made to run Doom level data.
- cptnapalm 4y agoI love John Carmack.
- ac29 4y agoThe supported hardware list contains machines that werent particularly rare: A/UX 1.0 ~ A/UX 2.0 [ 68020 w/PMMU, 68030 ] Macintosh II, Rev B, with a 68851 PMMU Macintosh SE/30 Macintosh IIx, IIcx, IIsi, IIci, IIfx A/UX 3.0 ~ A/UX 3.1.1 [ 68040 ] Centris 610, Centris 650 Quadra 605, 610, 650, 700, 800, 900, 950. AWG 60, 80, 95
- ncmncm 4y agoAn SE/30 was not especially rare or exotic.
- Maursault 4y agoI wonder why the Mac port of Doom, November 4, 1994, doesn't run on A/UX in the compatibility layer, Macintosh Application Environment (MAE). If it does, then that is why.
- anyfoo 4y agoI don't think porting DOOM is about actually wanting to play it. It's extremely doubtful that someone who wants to play DOOM is only able to do so on their A/UX machine.
- asveikau 4y agoYou could probably run the 68k mac port unmodified on a/ux. A/ux ran contemporaneous Mac binaries unmodified. (Source: I have a quadra with a/ux i haven't touched in about 10 years)
- kalleboo 4y agoThe article mentions this as a reason why this has post has likely not been done before - while 68K Mac Doom requires 7.1 and A/UX supplies 7.0.1, Mac Doom can be modified to run anyway
- asveikau 4y agoI must have skimmed over that. I seem to recall seeing doom on a Mac in the system 7 era, but i guess it was 7.1 or later.
- dhosek 4y agoThe only place I ever heard of A/UX was when I was the device drivers editor for TUGboat and there were some TeX DVI drivers that were available on that platform.
- Taniwha 4y agounix v6 - go for it!