DOOM Neo Geo progress...You guys are insane...

Added: 2026-06-09

[00:00:00]Last week, I made a video talking about the difficulties in getting a Doomstyle game running on the Neo Geo thanks to its spritebased architecture and the way that it kind of renders its graphics.

[00:00:11]Now, if you haven't seen that video, I do recommend you check it out before you take a look at this one. I will leave a link to that in the description below. A lot of you have watched that video and it's kind of been passed around a lot.

[00:00:23]But the interesting part about all this is that there have already been some interesting enhancements and updates to the Raycaster program that I wrote last week kind of showing off a Raycaster style Wolfenstein 3D style game that potentially could run on the Neo Geo.

[00:00:41]Now, if you recall, my version of that Raycaster was very unoptimized and ran at just eight frames a second or so. But the community has already come to the table with some very important updates on Blue Sky. A developer known as Morb or Messen.ninja was able to optimize my raycasting program to run a lot faster. It's probably at double the frame rate here.

[00:01:07]It was just some small but impactful optimizations that were done to the codebase. And look how much better it runs now. It runs so much better. And I was able to pull down his changes and compile it myself and test it on my own build here. And as you can see, it runs very, very well. This is great to see because this to me does really solidify the fact that a game like Wolfenstein 3D could run on the Neo Geo without any additional hardware at all. Because if we're getting performance like this on Cbased code, then with a optimized assembly language raycaster routine, it does mean that I think it opens up the door for a game like Wolfenstein. And the developer has not stopped there.

[00:01:52]He's also started to implement sprites, monsters in the game, as well as the weapon sprites in the HUD layer or in the fix layer. And slowly but surely, this is something that I could see a 3D style ray casting game running on the Neo Geo. And this is really cool, right?

[00:02:12]But it doesn't stop there. This is a little bit more interesting because another developer known as Sabino also forked my raycasting program and he's built what is known as Doom Geo AES.

[00:02:26]Now, I had to build this for myself because I still wasn't quite sure if this was a real project, but this is what it says here on the GitHub. It says, "Doom goes a Neo Geo AES research prototype that pushes Dooml like gameplay through the hardware the way the machine wants to draw. Sprite strips, pre-baked graphics, fixed layer UI, and very small runtime data. Now, if you take a look at this screenshot, this looks pretty good, right? And you can as clear as day see the 80 strips of sprite data being tiled across the viewport as clear as day. And this is very Neo Geo.

[00:03:06]But I kind of had to see this for myself because these screenshots kind of look too good to be true almost. Uh if you take a look at the screenshots on the GitHub page, these look like something that you wouldn't really expect to see after a week of, you know, my video coming out. So I ended up compiling this for myself. And as you can see here, it's very early proof of concept, but it's starting to look very promising. Of course, this is still using a raycaster.

[00:03:32]So, even though this is, you know, has a Doom style look about it, it's really just a Doom code of paint, if you will.

[00:03:39]There is still inherently a lot of things that make Doom not available in this build. This is still very much a raycasting game. But as you start to move around the map here, you can see how this is all working, right?

[00:03:52]Especially when you kind of approach a wall, you can see that sprite layer, the the shrink layer really kind of kicking in. And I will say that as you approach a wall, it does kind of expand a little bit too much and it kind of takes you out of, you know, the 3Dness of the scene itself. But these types of things can be fixed. There's also the implementation of weapons in the game.

[00:04:13]There's also a uh monsters have already been implemented as well as changing out weapons and you know picking up keys and stuff like that. Obviously this is still very early on in development but this is also very encouraging and again this is something that runs on original hardware on real hardware and emulation. There is no additional hardware that is needed at this time. Now, the very clever part about Doom Gio AES is that it does take the WAD files from Doom and it converts the lumps, the player start, the doors, the secrets, the sectors, everything into a Neo Geo grid that can be run on the Neo Geo. And of course, this is something that is is still very much early in development. Now, I think for me the biggest issue that's kind of taking me out of the feeling of this being a true 3D world is the floors and the ceilings. As you can see, the floors and ceilings are static. So, as you kind of move forward, the floor isn't moving with you. So, it almost feels like you're suspended while the walls are moving towards you. And this is one of the things that I kind of talked about in my previous video where I said it would be difficult to implement ceilings and floors in the game. It's not impossible and there's definitely a way to work around that. I think even if you just have precomputed wall and floors that kind of just move towards you with precomputed values, that may be good enough. But as it stands, this is probably the biggest omission that I'm seeing in this proof of concept build at this time. Some of the weapons have already been implemented. The fist, pistol, shotgun, chain gun, rocket launcher, plasma fire, BFG have playable runtime pass when the selected eyewad supplied the matching pace sprite art.

[00:06:08]These two updates have just occurred after a week of my video coming out. So yeah, a lot of people kind of said, you know, MVG put some bait out to see if it was possible. And look, I'm not going to deny it. There's definitely a lot of smarter people out there than me that really know their way around the Neo Geo and how to optimize code and how to make things work, right? But I'm very, very encouraged about this. Look, I'm going to leave it here for today's episode. I just wanted to give you guys a follow-up to the Doom on the Neo Geo video that I did last week. And if there's more interesting updates to show you, I will definitely follow up again in the future. But I think it's just a matter of time at this point before someone out there gives us doom on the Neo Geo.

[00:06:53]Whether that is completely stock with additional hardware, it's still very much up in the air, but people are definitely up for the challenge, and I'm very much here to see what the results are. We're going to leave it here for today's episode, guys. I will leave links to both the things that you saw in the description below, including the the the GitHub repositories where you can find both. Both of these can be compiled up and tested by yourself. This is not smoke and mirrors in any capacity. But for now, guys, we are going to leave it here. Thank you so much for watching. If you liked it, please don't forget to leave me a thumbs up and we will catch you in the next episode. Bye for now.