> The author of DOOM for SNES, Randy Linden, did not have access to any documentation about the GSU chip or even DOOM source code. He reverse engineered all of it
Technically this is impressive, but why was it necessary?
Randy Linden, the port's sole programmer, initiated the port of Doom for the Super NES on his own initially, as he was fascinated by the game.
Since Doom's source code was not yet released at the time, Linden referred to the Unofficial Doom Specs as a means of understanding the game's lump layout in detail. The resources were extracted from the IWAD, with some (notably sprites such as the player's sprites and the original status bar face sprites) unused due to technical limitations.
According to an interview, due to lack of development systems for the Super FX, Linden wrote a set of tools consisting of an assembler, linker, debugger, dubbed the ACCESS, on his own Amiga before beginning development of the port proper. For the hardware kit, he utilized a hacked Star Fox cartridge and a pair of modified Super NES controllers plugged into the console and connected to the Amiga's parallel port. A serial protocol was used to further link the two devices.
After developing a full prototype, he later showcased it to his employer, Sculptured Software, which helped him finish the development. In the interview, Linden expressed a wish that he could have added the missing levels; however, the game, already the largest possible size for a Super FX 2 game at 16 megabits (approximately 2 megabytes), only has roughly 16 bytes of free space. Linden also added support for the Super Scope light gun device, the Super NES mouse, and the XBAND modem for multiplayer. Fellow programmer John Coffey, himself a fan of the Doom series, made modifications to the levels, but some of those modifications were rejected by id Software.
I was lucky enough to work with Randy for quite a few years at Microsoft.
Incredible developer. He also made the Bleem! PlayStation emulator.
Funny enough none of his coworkers ever bothered to look him up online until after we all stopped working together at which point we all learned we'd been working with programming royalty.
A similar thing happened with the Wolfenstein 3D port as well, where John Carmack gave Rebecca Heineman kudos for learning Japanese to read the patents to get the technical documentation, always cool history around these things, some more in my post about it here:
https://eludevisibility.org/super-noahs-ark-3d-source-code
I can't speak to this case, but dev kits and SDK/documentation are often two separate SKUs and the latter has a higher price. If I remember the Crash Bandicoot guys found a hardware bug with memory card saving because they rolled their own code rather than using the SDK they didn't have.
MenhirMike|1 year ago
Randy Linden, the port's sole programmer, initiated the port of Doom for the Super NES on his own initially, as he was fascinated by the game.
Since Doom's source code was not yet released at the time, Linden referred to the Unofficial Doom Specs as a means of understanding the game's lump layout in detail. The resources were extracted from the IWAD, with some (notably sprites such as the player's sprites and the original status bar face sprites) unused due to technical limitations.
According to an interview, due to lack of development systems for the Super FX, Linden wrote a set of tools consisting of an assembler, linker, debugger, dubbed the ACCESS, on his own Amiga before beginning development of the port proper. For the hardware kit, he utilized a hacked Star Fox cartridge and a pair of modified Super NES controllers plugged into the console and connected to the Amiga's parallel port. A serial protocol was used to further link the two devices.
After developing a full prototype, he later showcased it to his employer, Sculptured Software, which helped him finish the development. In the interview, Linden expressed a wish that he could have added the missing levels; however, the game, already the largest possible size for a Super FX 2 game at 16 megabits (approximately 2 megabytes), only has roughly 16 bytes of free space. Linden also added support for the Super Scope light gun device, the Super NES mouse, and the XBAND modem for multiplayer. Fellow programmer John Coffey, himself a fan of the Doom series, made modifications to the levels, but some of those modifications were rejected by id Software.
devbent|1 year ago
Incredible developer. He also made the Bleem! PlayStation emulator.
Funny enough none of his coworkers ever bothered to look him up online until after we all stopped working together at which point we all learned we'd been working with programming royalty.
Dwedit|1 year ago
superfamicom|1 year ago
burnte|1 year ago