Doom On Sysop-64

[00:00:01][music] [music] >> A question I get a lot about sysop 64 is, can it play Doom?

[00:00:29]As you can probably guess, that's pretty easy for the sysop 64 cartridge [music] running on the DE10-Nano. In this video, I'll show you how to run it and some of the unique options for the sysop 64 cartridge. Let's dive in.

[00:00:43]We start with the amazing Chocolate Doom source port and [music] give it the ability to render using DMA on the sysop 64 cartridge. As you can see here, I've added a bunch of sysop 64 specific options.

[00:00:56]Including things like joystick and mouse input, a host of dithering and display tuning options, SID music and PCM audio, and a few things to clean up some of the parts of the display that don't convert to multi-color bitmap very well.

[00:01:12]If you start the display tuning HTTP server, you can use a browser from another machine to alter the display conversion settings.

[00:01:20]From here, you can change the target color palette or set contrast, gamma, and brightness levels, among other things.

[00:01:30]You can pick from a bunch of standard dithering algorithms and modify the strength of the dithering as well.

[00:01:37]With all these options, you should be able to find something that works pretty well with your display. Once you find something you like, you can also save as a preset or copy the command line arguments to use next time you launch.

[00:01:52]Even after tuning, most of the menus and in-game messages don't look that great after color conversion and dithering.

[00:02:00]And to help with that, we introduced a bunch of clean options to just redraw in a simpler way.

[00:02:05]As you can see here, the menus and the messages look more like what you might expect on a Commodore 64 when using this option.

[00:02:14]Now, if I skip to the exit on this level, you can see the end of level stats and they're much easier to read.

[00:02:21]It's completely optional though. Choose whichever style you prefer.

[00:02:26]Next up, let's talk about sound options.

[00:02:30]As you can see here, I'm running the June 25th build of the Sysop 64 FPGA core.

[00:02:36]Starting with that build, the core now provides eight channels of 16-bit 48 kHz [music] stereo audio and the FPGA handles mixing those channels with the primary SID output. That's only usable with the HDMI output, of course.

[00:02:49]>> [music] >> Using these new sound APIs, we can now play the original Doom sound effects while playing the game. As for the music, by default, it will look for this Doom SID recreation by Clegg with [music] the name at Doom's Gate, but you can specify the path to whatever SID tune you want like I'm showing here.

[00:03:10]And then inside the game, you can use the menu [music] to control the volume mix between the SID tune and the PCM audio sound effects.

[00:03:26]Next up, let's talk more about input options.

[00:03:30]If you want to play with a mouse and keyboard combination, you can use any USB mouse plugged into the DE10-Nano.

[00:04:02]>> Of course, if you want that classic Commodore 64 feel, there's an option to play with a joystick plugged into the C64, too.

[00:04:10]Hold the fire button while moving to run fast or strafe. You can also open doors by holding the button. It's not as good as using the keyboard, but it's playable.

[00:04:35]Now, of course, what makes Doom so much fun is multiplayer. I've added some simplistic networking code to the SysOp 64 Chocolate Doom code to enable that.

[00:04:46]In this case, I've joined on another Commodore 64, also with a SysOp cartridge on my local network.

[00:05:01]By the way, this is a custom level called Area 8, created by this guy, that I played endlessly back in the day.

[00:05:09]To run Doom on your SysOp 64, you can grab a release from the GitHub repo linked in the description. You will need to provide your own doom.wad file, as well as the @doomsgate sid music music file, which you can get from the High Voltage sid music collection.

[00:05:25]If you clone the same repo onto your SysOp 64, you can also just compile it yourself like this, and then you can modify it to your heart's content.

[00:05:38]Don't [music] forget, please like and subscribe to show your support for this project. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

[00:05:47]>> [music] >> Fearless.