Hi all I'm Romain (N0rt0N85). I'm building Mimas Engine, a Doom port for the Saturn that actually leans on the hardware, running here on real hardware (Phoebe ODE).
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The idea: The infamous 1997 Saturn Doom was a pure software renderer that ignored the VDP1/VDP2 (Carmack vetoed Jim Bagley's hardware engine, and later called it a mistake). Mimas Engine is my shot at the hardware-accelerated Saturn Doom that never shipped, and because it's a real Doom engine, the content is just a WAD: drop in a vanilla / limit-removing WAD and you have your own FPS on real Saturn hardware, no Saturn code required.
Under the hood
Credits. Engine = doomgeneric/Chocolate-Doom; the texture cache is ported from d32xr; the VDP1 approach is inspired by Lobotomy's SlaveDriver/PowerSlave (my renderer diverges with hybride world (vdp1, vdp2, sh-2). Big respect to Fafling too, Mimas is a different, ground-up take (hardware rendering + big-WAD engine) rather than a patch of the retail binary.
I'll keep this thread as a dev-log and will publish videos on this youtube playlist;
Happy to dig into any technical questions.
Feedback very welcome!
Romain
▶️
The idea: The infamous 1997 Saturn Doom was a pure software renderer that ignored the VDP1/VDP2 (Carmack vetoed Jim Bagley's hardware engine, and later called it a mistake). Mimas Engine is my shot at the hardware-accelerated Saturn Doom that never shipped, and because it's a real Doom engine, the content is just a WAD: drop in a vanilla / limit-removing WAD and you have your own FPS on real Saturn hardware, no Saturn code required.
Under the hood
- doomgeneric / Chocolate-Doom core, rendered across both SH-2 CPUs (slave-CPU column/visplane renderer with work-stealing).
- VDP1 hardware walls (distorted sprites) + VDP2 hardware sky and floor;
- Big WADs stream from the CD with no RAM cart : Doom II / Ultimate / Plutonia / TNT and the community WADs hopefully !
- Built on SRL, thanks @ReyeMe, it made this genuinely pleasant (basically a flagship SRL demo).
Credits. Engine = doomgeneric/Chocolate-Doom; the texture cache is ported from d32xr; the VDP1 approach is inspired by Lobotomy's SlaveDriver/PowerSlave (my renderer diverges with hybride world (vdp1, vdp2, sh-2). Big respect to Fafling too, Mimas is a different, ground-up take (hardware rendering + big-WAD engine) rather than a patch of the retail binary.
I'll keep this thread as a dev-log and will publish videos on this youtube playlist;
Happy to dig into any technical questions.
Feedback very welcome!
Romain
