The other day we caught up with John Romero at the DevGAMM in Lisbon, and while we also asked him for more details on his still secret, brand new FPS, we naturally looked back at classics such as Doom, Castle Wolfenstein, Heretic, or Hexen in the following video.
At one point the conversation steered towards more technical buzzwords of the nineties such as Deluxe Paint, NeXTSTEP, limited color depth, and how things were done back then, which made us ask Romero about the more recent meme, or the challenge, of Doom being run on printers, cars, chocolate bars, and pretty much anything with a screen on it.
“Yeah, it’s one of the most portable code bases you can find. It’s written in C”, he explains. “And the thing that made Doom go really fast was the renderer, which was done in assembly language on an 8086. So there’s a bunch of C code, and then there’s the assembly language right in the middle of the C to make that one strip go fast. That code is actually written in C just in case you don’t write assembly, right? So you can just uncomment the C line, and it’ll work, but a lot slower. But it’s an example of what you need to translate into assembly. And if you do that one function, then the whole render will go fast.”
“I was very surprised that a pregnancy stick actually has enough RAM to hold Doom and run it”, he laughs later on when asked about the most surprising devices he’s seen running the game. “And then making bacteria generate a Doom screenshot, and it’s like eight hours per frame to go through Doom with bacteria creating each screen”.
What is your favorite “Doom running on” meme?