> I created two apps, one to draw the 3do logo and the other to show the logicware logo. After they executed, they were purged from memory and the main game could run without loss of memory.

I believe Morrowind on OG Xbox does something similar when you transition from the main menu to the actual game. Very clever.

Didn't an Xbox game actually set it up so the entire processor would reboot and just appear to be loading a level?

That was also Morrowind. I believe they said it happened when the console was running low on memory, they would just reboot when you transition between areas. You would get the dreaded 'long loading screen' which was the console rebooting in disguise.

You could set an image to display while the console rebooted, so they put up a loading screen and rebooted the console. When the console rebooted, the game knew it was in a "loading" screen, and picked up from there.

I love that they did it, and I love that Microsoft knew it could happen and built in a custom image feature for reboots.

Modern problems require modern solutions, indeed.

The real snazzy way would have been to use an older chip in the HDMI processing pipeline somewhere, and let you play an older game on that chip. I believe Nintendo has used older generation chips as sub-chips now and then.

> HDMI processing pipeline somewhere

The original xbox didn't even have an HDMI port.

Plus, I believe at that time Namco owned the patent on "games during loading screens".

This was a fairly common technique in the 8 but days with disk based games, and Exile even did it on the cassette version - you loaded the game menu, loaded your saved fame, and then loaded the game.

> I had no time to port the music driver, so I had a band that Art Data hired to redo the music so all I needed to do is call a streaming audio function to play the music. This turned out to be an excellent call because while the graphics were lackluster, the music got rave reviews.

Wow, no kidding. The music is terrific.

[1] DOOM 3DO soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjEx292Ph8M

...and for bonus points, play that soundtrack as a background for the AI Herzog-Zizek infinite conversation [1]. It is glorious.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33437296

PSX Doom soundtrack is also pretty unique, abandoning the electric guitar in favor of ambient gloomy horror atmosphere.

The producer's name is Aubrey Hodges. He also made the music for Doom 64. You can find (and buy) both soundtracks on his webpage: http://www.aubreyhodges.com/discography/discography/

I recently made some posts about a couple of other Rebecca Heineman games for DOS:

- Mindshadow (1985). https://www.instagram.com/p/CkbiWcIhM2p/

- Borrowed Time (1985). https://www.instagram.com/p/CkeMZJfhHkK/

She has been making games for so long and made many popular ones!

Ross from Accursed Farms just did Killing Time playthrough for Halloween, another game coded by Heineman.

Ross's Game Dungeon: Killing Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV60gwgq1yc

This commit from 29 days ago added a ton of behind-the-scenes photos from the shoot for the full motion videos which was going to be included in the game and which were famously cut [1].

https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do/commit/f3ea056bc9659bc...

[1] - https://www.timeextension.com/features/the-true-story-behind...

The sad part is the FMV was cut from the retail release because of time constraints. The story of Doom on 3DO is truly a fascinating take of just about everything (except the music) going terribly wrong.

This was the same person "Burger" [1] who worked on The Bard's Tale. I can't even tell you how many hours I spent playing those games as a kid.

> This is the temple of the Mad God. What is thy business, unbeliever?

# [S]peak to the priest

> Only those who know the name of the Mad One are welcome. What wilt thou say?

# burger

> Thou hath uttered the most unspeakable word! Prepare to die!!!

> Now you did it. Before you, you see 99 Ancient Enemies, 99 Jabberwocks (20'), 99 Maze Masters (30'), and 99 Gimps (40').

# [F]ight bravely

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Heineman

Oh wow, I had no idea! I played The Bard's Tale a lot when I was a kid on a DOS machine, making my own maps on grid paper and stuff.

I just bought The Bard's Tale trilogy remaster[0] on steam yesterday, and it's great! It's just that sweet spot of being very close to the original, while still having many QoL upgrades to iron out the more painful parts. I highly recommend people who like dungeon crawling types of games (like legend of grimrock) to give it a go!

[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/843260/The_Bards_Tale_Tri...

If you haven't seen it yet, Rebecca Heineman, the author of this code has a long video explaining how this was made. Highly recommended:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBbIil2HPSU

This post comes just after Angry Video Game Nerd discussed almost all console ports of Doom, including 3do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5zyhC11hzQ

Why do people keep porting DOOM to different obsolete platforms or recreating it in Javascript? Is there some internal "cool" factor for doing this in super niche geeky dev communities?

This was made over 20 years ago. The 3do never had much success but it wasn't obsolete yet.

The answer to both is… yes.

I could have tried to port, say, Actua Soccer to SCO Xenix, but I went with DOOM because the source is available, every detail is known, there’s a million different ports to learn from, there’s a reasonably clear separation of OS dependent and independent parts, everyone loves DOOM, it runs on any hardware, porting DOOM to platform X is almost a meme, … should I continue?

Niche? Porting DOOM is pretty much the canonical mainstream thing to do to new or newly discovered old platforms.

That being said, this is about the original, and official, commercial DOOM port decades ago.

Try actually reading, it's the original port.

When one sees the last commit as 29 days ago, or the previous commit as 8 years ago, one can easily assume it wasn't code from 1995. So again. Why is this even interesting?

Read the readme instead of arguing on HN about it

github (and git) wasn't around in 1995

One should read the readme's.

let people enjoy things.

Seriously.

Different strikes for different folks.

I love stuff like this. It’s computer history. It’s interesting from a technical perspective as well as being a snapshot of culture.

> The complete archive for DOOM for the 3DO

It's funny how you bother to look at the commit dates, but not the README and repository description

Man you must be a hoot at parties.

The responses you are seeing is what happens when you lack self awareness and humility.

It's open source, easy to port, and people that played PC games in the 90's have fond memories of it.

Wonderful to see this stuff online...

For those of you who don't know the utter sh*tshow that was the 3DO version of Doom, and the full story of Randy Scott and Art Data Interactive, here's an article that's well worth the read.

https://www.badgamehalloffame.com/doom-3do/

TLDR; Randy Scott knew nothing about software development, but that didn't stop him from getting people in his church to invest $100k to start Art Data Interactive and license source code from ID. He told 3DO he could do it, and would add new levels, new weapons, you name it. At the time Doom was a big deal, and 3DO heavily promoted it as the systems flagship title and the best version you could play. Knowing nothing about software development, Scott believed all that had to be done to put a new weapon into a game was to "provide a programmer a picture of what it was supposed to look like". Kept saying it was being worked on and "90% complete" but had nothing to show. As time ticked by, 3DO finally realized the mess they were in, but had to deliver something at launch, with their back against the wall they recruited an outside developer to "finish up some bugs and get the game ready for shipping and get it out in about a month or two". Turns out no work had been done, the programmer had to go directly to her contacts at ID, with many late night heroics to get the game done in 10 weeks for Xmas launch.

All that's missing from this story is having Randy twirling his mustache. Last I heard he was arrested a few years back for some stuff I won't mention here... You can't make this stuff up...

> Last I heard he was arrested a few years back for some stuff I won't mention here..

Is this article about the person? [1]

"Music School Owner Accused of Molesting Two Young Students"

According to this article [2], he outright lied.

"Presumably to get her on board, Art Data told Heinemann a huge lie while negotiating a contract. She was told by Randy that the game was 90% complete and just needed a few bug fixes. The reality, of course, was that development had barely started – Art Data had nothing but a long list of empty promises."

Also the individual doesn't appear to hold much business acumen:

"With DOOM now in a “shippable” (but far from finished) state, Randy Scott went ahead and did something magnificently stupid. He requested 50,000 copies to be printed, notching up $150K in licensing and manufacturing fees from 3DO in the process. The 3DO’s user base was sitting at around 250K at the time, with the system’s big releases selling somewhere between 10K-20K"

[1] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/music-school-owner-accuse...

[2] https://www.gamesasylum.com/2016/05/17/the-unfortunate-tale-...

This stuff is captivating. Are there any other writeups of clutch moments like this that you know of?

Game industry related, Darknet Diaries episode 45 and 46 "Xbox Underground" [1][2]

Things really start to escalate into episode two. Absolutely insane ending. I won't spoil it for you.

[1] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/45/

[2] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/46/

This is great, thank you so much

Yeah, that article is about the same person. He played guitar I believe, so it's no wonder he ended up owning a music store.

The music in the 3DO version was recorded by him and his church band... mainly because there was no time to write a music driver and it was much simpler just to stream regular AIFF audio... It's a "heavy metal guitar" version of the music, which is pretty fitting all things considered.

Strangely enough, the music he provided was the only positive thing that reviewers had to say about the game at the time. Many consider the 3DO port music to be better superior to the original FM tunes.

previous

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8679060

   85 points by joelby37 on Dec 1, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments

I just wished more consoles were successful than the major three we have now.

If Jaguar, 3do were still around we would be in a better universe.

I don’t know. It feels like things always settle into two or three big players and maybe a few tiny niche players.

If Jaguar succeeded, maybe MS wouldn’t have made it and we’d still have three. Or MS would have bought Atari, so still three.

3D0 had a very interesting business model, but I’m not sure it’s sustainable for the industry. We seem addicted to powerful subsidized consoles.

both Jaguar and 3do were bad products. Atari was full of hardware bugs (apparently Tramiel the younger decided to ship after second tapeout before debugging was finished), and 3DO had hilarious price.

One reason that 3DO consoles were expensive is that the manufactures made nothing from game sales, unlike most consoles. There was a fee for making 3DO games, but it was small and only went to the 3DO company, not the manufactures.

Oh neat - I remember seeing this in Fabien Sanglard's book about Doom but I didn't realise that the source code had been released.

Interesting that the 3DO used an ARM processor (ARM60 I think). That's pretty unique for consoles.

To me the readme makes me feel like this guy is on another level when it comes to programming.

On a related note - I saw an original copy of shareware Doom the other day ( sealed condition) selling for $1500