Perhaps one of the more popular CD-ROM distributors was Walnut Creek, which had a good relationship with FreeBSD. Â Oddly enough it would eventually merge with BSDi, and split, merge, acquire, become acquired by others.
So I was hammering out something with SheepShaver (more on that later!) and I thought a quick test of just how fast SheepShaver is vs a real PowerMAC would be interesting. Â So I was playing with my old copy of SoftPC, which is 68000 based, but There were PowerPC versions, years ago when I bought a G4 to run OS X to only find out that it wasn’t supported (the dark days of OS X Server 1.0, before the 10.0 public beta) I used to run Windows NT 4.0 on SoftPC on MacOS 8.6. Â Ugh, dark times indeed!
So with some luck, I got SoftPC 3.0 up and running on MacOS 7.5.3 using SheepShaver for Windows. Then I noticed that unlike SoftPC for the 68000, SoftPC for the PowerPC emulates a 486! Â So how does DooM run? Â A little slow, it’s kind of dream like.
And much to my amazement it runs! Â And I was further impressed that there is a shim sound driver, and it works!
So I made a quick video to compare DooM for Windows vs DooM for MS-DOS on this setup.
Yes it’s pointless, but I kinda think it’s really cool.
As a bonus, here is E1M1 under MacOS 8.0. Â The MIDI support in 8.0 is MUCH more stronger than 7.5.3! Â And I should add, it actually feels faster on 8.0 than 7.5.3
How is this for cool? Â The source to DoomEd has been released! Â And what a time, when Previous is getting some functional networking making this a more interesting project as we can now take DOOM back to the 68000 where it all started.
This pic was taken for an interview in 1994 while making DOOM II. Jay, Adrian, Bobby, Kevin, John, me in front.
This original DOOM II box cover was painted by Julie Bell. The Cyberdemon didn’t look right so we switched to BROM
Here are Adrian’s scans from his sketchbook for various screens, pre-pixel edit
I would normally link to the jdsobox stuff so you can check out Doom in a browser, but Oracle has successfully screwed up Java so badly that it’s a nightmare to get any 3rd party applets to run.
I suppose as a consolation there is a javascript version of DOSBox, jsdosbox.
It’s a sizable download, 287MB, the majority being the ‘movies’ and ‘music’ directory.
The complete archive for DOOM for the 3DO
Yes, this is the infamous port of DOOM for the 3DO. Firstly, this was the product of ten intense weeks of work due to the fact that I was misled about the state of the port when I was offered the project. I was told that there was a version in existance with new levels, weapons and features and it only needed “polishing” and optimization to hit the market. After numerous requests for this version, I found out that there was no such thing and that Art Data Interactive was under the false impression that all anyone needed to do to port a game from one platform to another was just to compile the code and adding weapons was as simple as dropping in the art.
Uh… No…
My friends at 3DO were begging for DOOM to be on their platform and with christmas 1995 coming soon (I took this job in August of 1995, with a mid October golden master date), I literally lived in my office, only taking breaks to take a nap and got this port completed.
Shortcuts made…
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.
3DO’s operating system was designed around running an app and purging, there was numerous bugs caused by memory leaks. So when I wanted to load the Logicware and id software logos on startup, the 3DO leaked the memory so to solve that, 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.
There was a Electronic Arts logo movie in the data, because there was a time that EA was going to be distributing the game, however the deal fell through.
The verticle walls were drawn with strips using the cell engine. However, the cell engine can’t handle 3D perspective so the floors and ceilings were drawn with software rendering. I simply ran out of time to translate the code to use the cell engine because the implementation I had caused texture tearing.
I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the functions I needed in ARM 6 assembly.
This game used Burgerlib 2. My first “C” version of Burgerlib because Burgerlib was originally written in 65816 for the SNES and the Apple IIgs. If you check out Burgerlib 5 (The current version, also on github), you’d notice that some code is still in use.
I hope that everyone who looks at this code, learns something from it, and I’d be happy to answer questions about the hell I went through to make this game. I only wished I had more time to actually polish this back in 1995 so instead of being the worst port of DOOM, it would have been the best one.
And one more thing…
The intellectual property of DOOM is the exclusive property of ZeniMax. No transfer of the intellectual property of DOOM or any transfer of the ownership of the sounds, art or other game assets are given nor implied. If anyone wishes to release a version of DOOM 3DO commercially, contact ZeniMax for a license.
Sometime around 1992, Advanced Gravis teamed up with Forte/E-Tek to design a wavetable synthesis card around the ICS11614 IC. This card offered 32 channels, 14 channels @ 44khz and more channels would start dividing down in sound quality until you got to 32 channels at ~19khz. The mixing was done on-board which saved precious CPU cycles in the days of 286 and 386. The card originally advertised sound blaster support, but reading usenet posts from these days you can tell a lot of people were agitated that it was through a TSR, SBOS, that had hit or miss support and sometimes sounded better or worse than the FM because SBOS mixed it all into stereo.
I found out about these mythical cards a few years ago. A buddy went along with me to the local flea market out in the country-side of York, PA and we found a fellow who was trying to sell some P2-era laptops with USB wifi dongles and Windows XP loaded laptops for $100(!). I started talking with this gentleman and eventually convinced him to let me take a trip to his house and see what other stuff he may have. I took home a healthy share of various SB clones (mostly of the ESS variety, but a few Yamahas were in there as well) and some S3 Virge cards all for free. I built a computer with some of these parts, enough to play Doom and Heretic and started hitting up vogons and was reading some fanboism on the Gravis UltraSound cards. Where did I hear that name before? Oh, yes, in my mid-late 90s days of Doom I remember the setup.exe listed this card as an option and so did Duke3D and some other games I used to play quite frequently.
I did a lot of research on the card. Reading about how it used wavetable synthesis instead of FM. Basically, you can upload real MIDI-like patches to the cards RAM to get exceptional sound quality out of these older games and this also opens the window to creating your own patches if you wanted to tweak the sound of the songs.
Ultrasound Classic
Fast forward a couple of years later, I finally broke down and bought a GUS Classic v2.4 on ebay for $60. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out of the box. Failing to detect the card every single time, even if I removed everything from the computer and even disabled everything in the BIOS, including the FDC, Serial and Parallel ports. I got a refund, but a few days later I noticed some resistor had a broken leg and I soldered this and it started working! Immediately I loaded up Doom and the music sounded so much better than my SB or any of it’s clones.
Doom
Enjoying the sound, I started loading up other titles I played a lot back then that I remembered supporting this card: Descent, Heretic, Duke3D, Quake 1. I got a taste of some infamous Gravis issues when it came time to load up any Build engine title (Duke3D, Blood, SW, etc.) and Rise of the Triad. The music sounded great, but the digital voices had some weird clicks and somewhat static-like sound at the end of their samples. More research revealed that the GUS was known for this with those particular titles, and a ìsimpleî workaround is to get an SB card coexisting in the same box.
I amazingly got the SB and GUS living in the same machine after a few hours of fiddling around with some jumpers and tweaking autoexec.bat. Originally, I used one of those stereo to stereo cables. Running line out of the SB to the line in of the GUS, but the GUS’ mixer ìcolouredî the sound of the line in and mic in with entirely way too much bass. I made a cable that ran from line out of the SB16 to the CD-In of the GUS and it sounded excellent. I even found a way to keep my SB working in Win98SE this since it was known that the GUS had shitty support for the Win9x family (more on this later).
There are some shortcomings of the classic cards, the main being the Win9x drivers have no DirectSound support, only software emulation and usenet says that this had unpredictable results. Another annoying thing was no volume mixer(!), they expected you to hook this card up to powered speakers or ideally an amplifier. The v3.7 revision has a volume mixer but had problems with flip flopped stereo (whoops!) and v3.74 (the final GUS classic) fixed this problem. For those curious, for the most part revision versions don’t have bug fixes in their firmware, they just started finding ways to shrink the number of ICs on board. The exception to this was the v3.7 and v3.74 adding the volume mixer. GUS MAX v1.7 apparently had some sort of DMA or IRQ bug (forget these specifics) according to usenet, v1.8 fixed this problem and v2.1 is a v1.8 but lower component count and everything is now soldered on instead of sockets.
Other gotchas include: sound clicking and corruption on High-DMA, sometimes you can resolve this by setting 16-bit delay transactions but not all motherboards have this option and some just won’t work either way. Doubling up on the baseport, i.e. 220 also steals 320. Gravis claims you need to set the GUS and SB Emu IRQ to different values but they can be the same usually and have no problems. Same with the Playback and Recording DMA, unless you want full-duplex. If you’re just gaming it’s irrelevant.
Ultrasound MAX box
At some point, I was hungry for more, wanting to try out the later GUS models like the MAX, ACE, and PnP. Particularly the GUS MAX because it included the volume mixer, had a special Crystal CODEC chip for 16-bit recording (was released late in GUS classics life as a daughterboard but it is very rare), the CODEC chip allowed for Windows Sound System, but the port is non-standard (gotcha!) and a special SBOS, MAXSBOS, takes advantage of the CODEC chip as well, and finally some CD-ROM support on board but I was uninterested in that since most of you know how much of a nightmare it is to get that shit working properly. Back to ebay, found a fellow selling a boxed GUS MAX for $100. I didn’t have the total cash on me at the time and it was buy-it-now. Considering the card was fairly hard to find, at least from what I researched at the time, I contacted the guy about paying half now and the other half in a few days. He agreed, and asked that I send it as a gift via paypal. Long story short, he never sent it, stopped replying to my emails and since it was sent as a ìgiftî I had no recourse through ebay or paypal. Learn that lesson when dealing online everyone! Always offer to pay a little extra for the processing fee if they claim this is why they want it set as a gift!
Bummed out, I found another classic, this time a v2.7 and well what do you know, this one doesn’t work either! Tried for 3 days all kinds of things. Cleaning the entire board off with electrical contact cleaner, reseating the contacts on the socketed chips, reflowing solder joints, replacing capacitors, but nothing ever brought it back to life. A year or two later, I found another GUS MAX for sale on ebay, purchased it immediately and it did not work. I tried it in 3 separate PCs and got no results. It always just said baseport UNAVAIALBLE FOR ULTRASOUND for whatever baseport I set it to. However, it wasn’t a total loss. On a whim, I took the GF1 IC from this MAX and placed it in the broken v2.7 classic and it made this card live again.
I setup daily searches for ebay to alert me immediately of any GUS developments appearing. If you’re new to the whole Gravis thing you’ll see theres a guy in Hungary who always has overpriced ones for sale and is unwilling to budge on price. If you check out his feedback you will see that he has been selling GUS cards of all flavours since at least 2010(!) almost monthly. Months and months went by with no MAX showing up and when one finally did it went for way more than I was willing to spend especially with the track record of 2 (almost 3) DOA cards that required soldering and intense cleaning to live again. If you’re planning to experiment with GUS cards be sure the card was tested recently, if you get the typical responses of not having an ISA PC around any more to test it, get the card cheaply and be certain that they will honour the return policy if it does not work.
MAX 2.1 board
Finally, after a couple of years I did some networking and found some fellow demosceners with GUS MAXes for the price of shipping. I’m waiting on my v2.1, but received two v1.8s. The first one did not work at all, would never detect properly. Tried the usual suspects of cleaning it up, reseating, rocking the caps a little back and forth to make sure everything was making contact, etc. The second one, actually detected the card saying UNAVAIALBLE FOR ULTRASOUND yet again, but this time after I disabled my FDC, Serial and Parallel ports it worked! Excited, I loaded up the usual games and all worked great and the CODEC chip’s mixer program worked properly. Now, I was read to add the SB16 back in but now no matter what base port I would select it always complained it was unavailable, yet again! At some point I got it working sort of but then it wouldn’t let me set any DMA properly in the setup utility. Enough of this nonsense, I thought, I have a few socket 7 towers not being used.
I popped it in to a P1 166MHZ living by itself. Now we can try out that special MAXSBOS!… and unfortunately it doesn’t sound better than SBOS, in fact it sounds worse! And yes, I tried a separate IRQ for SB emulation and low-DMA, high-DMA, making sure the CD-ROM baseport doesn’t conflict with GUS’ baseport and I have 1MB RAM onboard that is 70ns.
At this point I should stop and mention a few other gotchas on these MAX cards. The GUS ìdoublesî up on the baseport. i.e. if you set 220 it will also grab 320. The CD-ROM baseport on these cards will be set, even if you disable the rest of the CD-ROM interface. So make sure you don’t have the CD-ROM set to the same or else it will always complain it’s unavailable for ultrasound in the setup utility. And yes, you just have to remove the IRQ and DMA jumpers on the card and put the jumper on the CD-ROM disable. Panasonic enable jumper appears to make no difference regards to enabling parts of the CD-ROM circuit, unless of course you planned on using the CD-ROM interface. I’m assuming most of you out there won’t be. You also need 70ns rated (or better) 256kx4 chip. The MAX has 512kb RAM on board but you NEED 1MB on any GUS card to get great results or live with missing instruments and all kinds of funnies happening to you. The CODEC also uses some baseport, but this is software selectable so you should have no serious problem there.
Now I go on to try this bad boy out in Win98SE with the special DirectSound enabled drivers. When you install the Gravis GF1 (non PnP) series drivers it will tell you that you have to install the card as a non-PnP device and restart, then manually set the DMA, IRQ, Baseport in the advanced properties for the card. This is fairly trivial if you’re used to DOS, but for newbies just keep it in mind. Another gotcha here is that the drivers will blank out your SET ULTRASND= and SET ULTRA16(for MAX users)= in your autoexec.bat after the reboot so write these values down. I believe this was done on purpose since most people auto loaded SBOS or MEGAEM (the other SB emulator they had) and this conflicts with Windows big time. The drivers do work and the sound quality is fine, but the biggest issue I’ve had is that sndvol32.exe never loads now. You can not adjust the volume or disable the mic-in and line-in and you really should as every card I’ve owned the recording inputs pick up a lot of interference. Moving the mouse and the HDD just all come through your speakers. I haven’t tried Windows 95 yet, maybe the mixer works okay there? At some point I’ll post an update and let internet-land know.
Gravis Ultrasound ACE
SoundBuddy 1.0 prototype
I don’t own these cards, but will mention them for clarity. The GUS ACE (internally referred to as the Sound Buddy) is simply a GUS Classic without the recording capabilities or the gameport. It was meant to be a supplement to a sound blaster or similar clone. You simply run the line out of this card to your line in of your SB16 (or maybe it’s vice-versa? Correct me if need be). You have to update your ultrinit to the last known version because there’s a bug in the official drivers(!) that does not disable the nonexistant gameport and it will steal your other sound cards gameport cause conflicts. For those who need the fix, GUS0047.ZIP. At one point, Gravis struck a deal with AMD to make an enhanced chip, called the InterWave which had GUS support and allows 8MB of samples (16MB apparently if you solder some stuff, but I have yet to see any pictures or even a textfile on this hack). Pouet.net sceners say that it has problems with long loops so some demos may sound wrong. IWSBOS is based from MAXSBOS so I assume it probably sounds just as bad compared to the final revision of SBOS. Usenet posts of users crying that the Win9x drivers are awful too, but again, I don’t own this card so I’m only just passing on what I have heard. Feel free to prove me wrong in the comments.
ViperMAX board
Other weirdo cards included the Synergy ViperMAX, which is basically a GUS with an ESS chip for SB compatibility. In theory, this means you should get decent Win9x support through the ESS. These cards are kind of rare now. I have yet to see one appear in the US. But, fellow Pouet.net users have found them across the EU so maybe they are common there. There were some other OEM variants, most similar in design to the ViperMAX. Check out Wikipedia for information on those if you really must know more.
My final thoughts on this long (still not quite yet over) journey is that the GUS Classic is a fun card for breathing some life into the soundtracks of older id and apogee titles with a few silly hang ups on getting it to work initially. The MAX did not live up to its mythical hype with the mixer, special CODEC chip, and Win9x drivers. These cards appear to be very delicate because I have had 3 out of 5 cards DOA and required fooling around to get them to work again. Even though 2 MAX cards still do not work no matter what I’ve tried. Expect to buy more than one to get a working card. The ideal setup would be to get a GUS Classic or ACE and get that to coexist with an SB or compatible clone. I can’t comment on the ViperMAX as I have not located one yet.
Gravis Ultrasound MAX 2.3 prototype
As much frustration these cards have brought me, they still sound nice when they work! But, it really does make a lot of sense why they are rare today. It is quite aggravating to get one working properly!
All of this would be useless without some samples of what a GUS sounds like, all samples were recorded at 44,100Hz, …
I never played DOOM over the internet, as by the time I had a proper connection and fast enough machine, Quake was all the rage, and all I had was this crappy cable modem that used a dialup connection for the upstream.
If I wanted to play multiplayer I’d wind up dong a LAN party anyways. Â We were living in the era of $20 NE2000 clones, and 56kb modems, with the occasional 1mbit down cable.
Anyways I recently saw The Internet DOOM Client/Server System v0.01, which was a simple TCP/IP DOOM matchmaking server that includes source the client and server. Â This eventually grew up into iDOOM. Â It looked simple enough and it does mention that it is based on the opensource IPX component of DOOM. Â I’d never looked at it so taking a peek I saw this:
DOOMNET.C
// hook an interrupt vector
p= CheckParm (“-vector”);
if (p)
{
doomcom.intnum = sscanf (“0x%x”,_argv[p+1]);
}
else
{
for (doomcom.intnum = 0x60 ; doomcom.intnum <= 0x66 ; doomcom.intnum++)
{
vector = *(char far * far *)(doomcom.intnum*4);
if ( !vector || *vector == 0xcf )
break;
}
if (doomcom.intnum == 0x67)
{
printf (“Warning: no NULL or iret interrupt vectors were found in the 0x60 to 0x66\n”
“range. You can specify a vector with the -vector 0x<num> parameter.\n”);
doomcom.intnum = 0x66;
}
}
printf (“Communicating with interupt vector 0x%x\n”,doomcom.intnum);
So for those who missed it, the IPX client just hooks in as a TSR, which doom calls down to, and then either sends or receives data. Â Now I wish I’d looked earlier I didn’t realize that it was something so simple.
So I thought it’d be interesting to watch it in action. Â Now it compiles on modern Linux, but it doesn’t work. Â I don’t know why, I didn’t investigate much. Â Instead I opted for a server from the era, UnixWare. Â Oddly enough that works (and so does OS X). Â I fired up GNS3, put the server on one network, and added two clients on separate TCP/IP networks. Â I went ahead with DOOM v1.2.
The clients are able to connect to the server, and once the both register, they drop out of the server, and pass all the command line arguments to TCPSETUP, and away they go. Now it’s worth noting that back in these days people use registered addresses. Â None of this will work with NAT as it expects 1:1 UDP port mappings. Â The clients are all equal peers.
So could a newer driver be written to support a server, and work behind NAT? Yeah I don’t see why not. Â Is there any point in doing so?
Probably not.
In 2004 it was hard enough trying to do a deathmatch online, but 2014?.. 20 years too late.
But it’s kind of interesting how convoluted the networking setup had to be for a 32bit protected mode program calling down to a real mode TCP/IP TSR, which in turn called the network driver. Â It’s amazing it even works.
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