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I now have this site powered by Blogger. If my work has paid off you won’t even really be able to tell I did anything at all. The idea behind Blogger is that, instead of me editing a web page in FrontPage, I set up a Blogger template and update through the Blogger website. This is a really neat idea – provided Blogger doesn’t go into dot-com hell.

So, on to other things. A port of Doom to the Dreamcast has been released. Coded by some independent hackers, DoomDC does a pretty bangup job. Considering that this is pretty much the first independent effort to port a piece of exisitng source code other than an emulator to the Dreamcast, it’s mighty impressive. It will run the IWAD files for Doom, Doom II, The French version of Doom which lacks the swastica location, Ultimate Doom and both episodes of Final Doom. However, while it does have full speed and sound support, it doesn’t play music just yet, nor does it feature multiplayer. Also, due to how the screen rendering is (so far) handled, the colors look a bit washed out. However, these are minor quibbles – this is the best console port of Doom ever. Doom‘s NeXTSTEP development platform meant that porting was relatively easy for id, so many consoles got Doom, but none of them ever got it right. The Atari Jaguar version was alright, but it had a low resolution (somewhere between the “high” and “low” on the PC) and the levels were abbreviated (some were missing, others had sections missing). Oh well, at least it had multiplayer through two linked Jaguars (finding a second person with a Jaguar, however, was the fun part). The Sega Genesis 32X version was laughable in that the screen size was too small and no sprites existed for any angle other than head on – all enemies were “coming right for you” all the time. The version for the 3DO player was pretty awful – lots of missing frames and the usual smaller levels. The versions for the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn did what they could given the lack of technology, but neither really went down in the history books. And the Super Nintendo port (running with the assistance of the FX2 chip) was, like the upcoming port to the Game Boy Advance, more of a technical demo/stunt than an actual port of the game – impressive for the platform in consideration, but the worst ports in so far as the game was concerned.

Still, it felt damn good to play that game again. I think I’m going to have to go fire up the Bobby Prince soundtrack tonight. Let’s just hope id doesn’t blow it with Doom III.