![]() ![]() They had moved on to Doom, and were happy entrenched in developing its engine, level-editing program, and game design. The guys accepted the job, cashed the check, and promptly forgot all about Wolfenstein's conversion. In 1993, id's biz manager, Jay Wilbur, had received a phone call from Imagineer, a publisher in Japan who promised a $100,000 advance if id's team would bring Wolfenstein 3D to the SNES. The team had handled only one other port in-house, Wolfenstein 3D on the Super Nintendo. Id's track record with ports was hit or miss. The Super Nintendo version made by veteran SNES development studio Sculptured Software played even choppier than the 32X version, and the Atari Jaguar adaptation, developed in-house at id, was only slightly sharper in terms of graphics. No other console platform compared to the more versatile PC. Sega's 32X port proved to be the rule of Doom ports, rather than the exception. It was very under-powered," Romero added. The result was a game that seemed to fizzle out when, in fact, players should have had another nine levels to play. Worse, Sega dropped one-third of Doom's levels, including its memorable Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind bosses, due to technical constraints. Consequently, demons always faced players, which meant they could not be ambushed or made to fight one another, staples of the experience playing on PC. Enemy sprites were hacked to pieces until only the front side remained. Choppy performance forced Sega's team to surround the playfield-the window into the game-with a border their solution lightened the processor's load, but made the already-indistinct graphics even harder to see. Pixels viewed from medium to far range, such as items and enemies in the distance, were blurred, indistinguishable unless viewed up-close. The 32X depended on the Genesis to run, and the Genesis was well past its expiration date. Sega's port turned out as well as the guys at id expected: Not very well at all. That's how Sega got the 32X version running." Sega 32X and Sega's port of Doom. "Carmack got as much information out of him as he could give about the processor," Romero said, "and then gave the engineer suggestions to make the blitter"-a circuit that rapidly modifies and moves data in memory-"go faster. To convert the game, Sega needed help figuring out how Doom's code should be modified to run on the 32X. At that moment, it was a work in progress. So did John Carmack, fellow co-founder of id. Romero and the rest of id Software's small team gathered 'round as the engineer set a monitor on the felt surface, plugged the prototype into it, and powered it on. When completed, it would power the 32X, Sega's add-on hardware that would evolve the Genesis console from a 16-bit dinosaur into a 32-bit giant. Their visitor hailed from Sega, and the item he placed on id Software's pool table was a motherboard, still in prototype stage. JOHN ROMERO'S EYES FOLLOWED THE engineer as he placed his cargo on the pool table. ![]()
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