It amazes me after all this time, noone has tried porting Doom to Saturn having the most under-developed games and dedicated fan base. Source code has been available for more than a decade and many source ports exist on the PC! Not only that, there was actually a commercial port of Doom for Saturn that was targetted for the playstation so Saturn never had this game properly ported (they actually tried to port a playstation version of the game instead of using the original source code which ended with very poor results).
Source code is C if I remember right and it'd be a great learning curve to using a dual cpu architecture and perhaps learning to use the GPU (in this case VDP's) for certain stuff (maybe do the ceiling and floors or something, that'd be pretty cool). Could do a very basic port by getting code to compile and run on the target machine and add different stuff from there (sound libraries, custom graphic engine, or anything really); and later learn to use second cpu for other tasks (decoding stuff in real-time like: compressed sound, sprites, textures or other compressed data). Many pc ports have added custom rendering that offloads graphics to a graphics library (opengl); don't know what kinda libraries are on the saturn but maybe something similar is available for using lesser known 3D hardware (think the playstation version got ported this way) and have multiple versions of the doom engine on saturn. Music would be another interesting aspect since saturn has hardware for many music functions if I remember correctly (think it has the most audio hardware functions from any game console that existed actually) and Doom is pretty limitless (has midi for a start).
Doom engine supports WAD files which can contain any type of game data so you could theoritically make any kind of 3D game with this engine. Small maps could be made to fit into ram for instance, and used for testing and benchmarking; wide open space with no variation and only two sprites (you could multiply the same sprite to save ram and see how efficient the engine renders on the target machine).
SSF emulator might be a good target for developing since saturn hardware is well emulated allowing to by-pass physical difficulties of a hardware development kit. Emulators are also nice if they have an option to increase system ram (could try porting Linux or whatever and expirement).
Many could learn programming skills if source ports of doom were on the saturn with source code available (we'd all be more technically skilled) and saturn owners would be really happy I'm sure.
Regards
Source code is C if I remember right and it'd be a great learning curve to using a dual cpu architecture and perhaps learning to use the GPU (in this case VDP's) for certain stuff (maybe do the ceiling and floors or something, that'd be pretty cool). Could do a very basic port by getting code to compile and run on the target machine and add different stuff from there (sound libraries, custom graphic engine, or anything really); and later learn to use second cpu for other tasks (decoding stuff in real-time like: compressed sound, sprites, textures or other compressed data). Many pc ports have added custom rendering that offloads graphics to a graphics library (opengl); don't know what kinda libraries are on the saturn but maybe something similar is available for using lesser known 3D hardware (think the playstation version got ported this way) and have multiple versions of the doom engine on saturn. Music would be another interesting aspect since saturn has hardware for many music functions if I remember correctly (think it has the most audio hardware functions from any game console that existed actually) and Doom is pretty limitless (has midi for a start).
Doom engine supports WAD files which can contain any type of game data so you could theoritically make any kind of 3D game with this engine. Small maps could be made to fit into ram for instance, and used for testing and benchmarking; wide open space with no variation and only two sprites (you could multiply the same sprite to save ram and see how efficient the engine renders on the target machine).
SSF emulator might be a good target for developing since saturn hardware is well emulated allowing to by-pass physical difficulties of a hardware development kit. Emulators are also nice if they have an option to increase system ram (could try porting Linux or whatever and expirement).
Many could learn programming skills if source ports of doom were on the saturn with source code available (we'd all be more technically skilled) and saturn owners would be really happy I'm sure.
Regards
