Sony PlayStation



The Sony PlayStation version of Doom is a port of Doom and Doom II by Williams Entertainment. It was released on November 16, 1995, and runs on a modified version of the Doom engine used in the Atari Jaguar port. It features 28 levels from Ultimate Doom, 23 from Doom II and 7 original levels.

The game features a multiplayer mode, but lacks split-screen; two consoles have to be together instead. This makes the multiplayer experience truer to the original, but at the expense of accessibility.

John Romero is quoted on the back cover, calling this the "best DOOM yet," and is credited as "Creator of DOOM". While Romero's quote may be taken with a grain of salt (according to Romero, he felt the original PC version was still the best due to its superior control), former id Software staff have consistently expressed how pleased they were with the job performed by the Williams team in performing the conversion. They were originally selected by id Software due to their renown in the arcade market and their acquisition of Tradewest, a company with extensive game console development experience.

It was followed shortly by a port of Final Doom, reusing the same engine and most custom resources. This version was also later used as the base for both the Sega Saturn port and Doom 64.

Gameplay


The rendering engine has been rewritten to utilize the PlayStation's 3D hardware. This renderer allows enhancements such as higher, alpha blending, colorized sectors and animated skies. Unlike the Jaguar version, this version does not render double-wide pixels and therefore preserves full horizontal resolution.

Rather than being split into episodes like the PC version, the levels from Ultimate Doom are lumped together into one continuous episode, splitting the game in two halves between the Ultimate Doom and Doom II levels. Doom II also lacks its intermission text screens. The original Doom levels are based on the Jaguar version, and therefore, as with all ports based on this version, the simplifications to the map geometry and texturing versus the PC version are carried over. The maps from Ultimate Doom's Episode 4 and Doom II contain fewer changes. The number of unique textures and monster types per map is lower than in the PC version, on account of limited VRAM space. Furthermore, large vertical heights have been reduced to account for a renderer limitation where textures can only tile once vertically before being stretched instead. While the framerate is higher than its contemporary console ports, there is still noticeable slowdown in certain levels, particularly when playing on the higher difficulty settings.

As a feature unique to the PS1 and Saturn ports, monsters from Doom II appear in Ultimate Doom levels when the game is played on the "Ultra Violence" skill level. Also, megaspheres can be found in the exclusive PS1/Saturn Ultimate Doom levels MAP29: Twilight Descends, MAP30: Threshold of Pain and MAP57: The Marshes, with the latter additionally featuring a super shotgun.

Several other exclusive maps are included: MAP54: Redemption Denied, MAP58: The Mansion, and MAP59: Club Doom.

Some enemies such as the baron of Hell, mancubus, cyberdemon and spiderdemon appear less frequently.

Enemies
A tougher type of spectre, the nightmare spectre, has been added. While the regular spectre looks like a partially invisible demon, the nightmare spectre is subtractively blended, and is harder to kill due to having twice the hit points of an ordinary spectre. Demons, spectres and nightmare spectres can infight each other in this game, as was possible in PC version 1.4 and earlier.

There is no arch-vile because the developers felt they could not do him justice on the PSX, because it had twice as many frames of animation as other monsters.

The final boss from Doom II is not in the game.

As the corresponding secret maps are missing, the game lacks the Wolfenstein SS and Commander Keen enemies.

As in the Jaguar port, enemies from Doom do different amounts of damage as compared to their PC counterparts. For example, a zombieman's pistol shots can inflict up to 24 damage, as opposed to the normal maximum of 15. Some enemies are also referred to in slightly different terminology in the game's manual. Zombiemen, again as an example, are referred to as "former soldiers" rather than "former humans".

This game's version of the revenant is considerably easier to tangle with than its PC counterpart; its running speed is approximately half normal, and is akin to a zombie's or imp's pace. While it only fires homing missiles, the missiles are also slower and easier to avoid.

Unlike the PC version, the Hell knight and baron of Hell monsters can infight in this game.

Levels
Notes
 * 1: ported from Jaguar Doom.
 * 2: exclusive level.
 * 3: entirely different map from PC version.
 * 4: originally titled Tower of Babel in Jaguar Doom.
 * 5: originally titled Dis in Jaguar Doom.

Differences from PC
For differences in the maps shared with other ports, see Atari Jaguar.
 * All of the gameplay, texture, and map changes from the Atari Jaguar version have been retained for the original Doom maps. Less significant changes were made to the Thy Flesh Consumed and Doom II maps; however, some of the larger maps were cut from the game.
 * Many animations had frames cut, making them seem choppier, one apparent example being rockets fired from the rocket launcher.
 * Some maps feature a new animated flaming sky.
 * The screen resolution was changed from 320x200 to 256x240, which is stretched to roughly 293x240 via rasterization.  by contemporary television sets, which is variable in nature, would on average show around 224 lines from the middle of the 240 line area, with an 8:7 . New graphics were made for the menu and intermission backgrounds, fonts, and status bar to fit this resolution. The aspect ratios of in-game geometry and sprites are not consistently adjusted, however: architecture appears considerably flattened relative to its PC appearance, while sprites are scaled differently and appear more faithful.
 * The sound effects are different from the PC version, and were later reused in Doom 64.
 * The PSX SPU's reverberation features are utilized, both for sound effects (mainly in enclosed areas) and soundtrack.
 * All weapon sprites have been reduced in size. The super shotgun suffered in particular, and was redrawn for the American and European versions of Final Doom, giving it a "sleeker" appearance.
 * Different status bar. The one used in this game has a darker tone (more black rather than gray in the original) and does not feature the listing of the remaining ammo of all types on the right side like the original.
 * There is no Nightmare! skill level.
 * Different cheat codes.
 * Passwords are used for loading; while they store numbers as map level, skill level, health, armor and ammo, the numbers for the latter three tend to be rounded. There is no Memory Card usage.
 * Spectres do not "shimmer", but are instead rendered using translucency. This is because the partial invisibility effect is difficult to reproduce using such a renderer.
 * Though the back of the box touts a "high framerate," the game in fact runs slower than its PC counterpart by design, targeting a 30 Hz framerate for rendering and 15 Hz game logic. Empirical testing shows few levels are actually capable of reaching the target framerate, most averaging in the 20s, and a few dipping as low as the single digits during intense gameplay. This must be measured against other competing console ports of the time, however, which had in most cases significantly worse framerate issues. Even many contemporary PCs were not guaranteed to run the DOS version at its full 35 Hz framerate.
 * Health bonuses and armor bonuses are worth 2% as opposed to 1% (this change remains in place from the Jaguar version).
 * (NTSC version only) Weapon bobbing amount depends on player speed (the weapon sprite moves like in PC version when running, and noticeably less when walking) and direction (when strafing, the weapon sprite moves to larger distance to one side, then to much smaller distance to the other side).
 * When walking over damaging sector, the player's face changes to STFKILL immediately, even if no damage is being taken.
 * The player's face does not change to STFKILL when firing weapons for a prolonged time other than the chaingun and plasma rifle.

Development
Byron Cook, co-founder of Tradewest and a business manager at Williams Entertainment, was long-time friends with id Software businessman Jay Wilbur. Wilbur and John Romero met with Cook at the Williams office in Houston, Texas, initially to discuss a desire to develop a version of Doom for what was then known as the Nintendo Ultra 64. Because Nintendo had not yet provided any information to developers about the hardware, nor committed to any firm release date for it, Byron suggested that in the meantime Williams could also develop a version of Doom and Doom II for the Sony PlayStation console.

According to programmer Aaron Seeler, the project would serve as a "development base for all the ... tech and tools we would need to bring up [Doom] for the N64". Having no previous experience with 3D graphics hardware, Seeler temporarily moved to the id Software offices in Richardson and took an office next door to John Carmack, where he would learn directly from the senior id Software programmer both about the Doom source code and 3D graphics in general (Carmack was gearing up for the development of Quake at the time).

Seeler cites two major challenges for the project:
 * To accomplish perspective-correct texture mapping on the PlayStation hardware, which does not natively support it;
 * To make the game run at an acceptable framerate.

For the former, a solution was adapted to use a renderer similar to that of the PC and the Atari Jaguar versions, which rendered the scene as a collection of columns and spans of constant-depth pixels. To do this on the PlayStation hardware, Seeler would turn each column and span into a one-pixel-wide triangle, referencing the proper texture coordinates.

The Williams team were given wide berth to exercise their creativity on the project due to the respect held for them by the id team. This included the freedom to create new maps for the game, as well as encouragement by John Carmack to Aaron Seeler, after a disappointing initial prototype, to add features that would take advantage of the PlayStation's powerful hardware, including its signature support for colored lighting, and use of shading and alpha blending effects.

As there were no concerns about a shareware version, Williams staff made the decision to turn the Ultimate Doom levels into a single continuous episode, adding their new maps to Thy Flesh Consumed in order to "bridge the gap" to episode four. Feeling Nightmare skill to be imbalanced, they also decided to replace it with the concept of adding Doom II monsters to the original Doom levels when the game was played on Ultra-Violence.

Due to a royalties agreement id Software had with composer Bobby Prince, Williams made the decision to eschew such payments and instead tapped Aubrey Hodges for new music composition and sound design. As the game already leaned heavily in a horror direction due to the team's extensive work on lighting effects, Hodges chose to design a nightmarish ambient soundscape to complement the visuals.

Music
New ambient background music for most levels sequenced using the PlayStation SPU's capabilities. Additionally, is used for the title, menus, demos, intermission, finales, and for the main section of the secret level, Club Doom. Aubrey Hodges created the soundtrack and reused certain songs (the symphonic rock/metal theme, most noticeably) in Doom 64.

Technical details

 * The disc contains several WAD files. Each map is in its own WAD file, ranging from MAP1.WAD (which contains MAP01) to MAP59.WAD. An additional archive, PSXDOOM.WAD, contains all resources, including several unused ones. This makes it a total of 60 WAD files.
 * The WADs use the same LZSS-based compression method as the Jaguar Doom port; however, they are little-endian files, as opposed to the Jaguar's big-endian WAD.
 * The files with RAW extension contained in the CDAUDIO folder are actually files linked to the respective audio tracks, which contain the actual audio data.
 * The Doom PLAYPAL is different on multiple points:
 * Color values are stored in the PlayStation's native 16-bit little-endian ABGR format (using the most significant bit as an alpha mask and five bits for each color channel).
 * Index 0 is transparent in all palettes, and none of the other indices are transparent in any palette. Palette colors differ slightly from PC Doom's.
 * There are a total of 20 palettes. The first fourteen are equivalent to Doom's, though the tints are not necessarily identical.
 * Palette 14 is used for the invulnerability effect. Since this port uses a hardware renderer which ignores COLORMAPs, invulnerability is handled as a palette flash instead.
 * Palette 15 is used for the fire sky. Only the first 37 indices are actually used.
 * Palette 16 is quite similar to palette 0, with some odd differences. It is used for interface graphics such as CONNECT, NETERR, LOADING, PAUSE, LEGAL, STATUS, as well as IDCRED2 and WMSCRED2.
 * Palette 17 is used for the TITLE and DOOM graphics.
 * Palette 18 is used for IDCRED1.
 * Palette 19, the last one, is used for WMSCRED1.


 * All textures have power-of-two dimensions. When the image itself was not resized to fit the dimensions, the added areas are filled with black (index #255).
 * Textures are not composited. Instead, they are placed between T_START and T_END markers. Each individual texture lump is an 8-bit graphic whose indices reference the offsets into the PLAYPAL (known as 8-bit CLUT graphics by PlayStation developers).
 * The TEXTURE1 lump merely enumerate texture dimensions in sequence. Textures are not identified by their name, instead they are enumerated in the same order as they appear in the WAD. However, each individual texture file already features its dimensions, making the TEXTURE1 lump seem redundant - it is used to load the data for all textures at once without being required to seek through multiple files on the PlayStation's slow 2X speed CD-ROM drive. Textures are not composited from multiple patches.
 * Spectres and nightmare spectres are not separate mobj types, but merely demons with some specific flags set. These flags can technically be used with other things as well.



!Bitmask!!Effect!!Use
 * 50% transparency (B/2+F/2)||Cacodemon on Tenements
 * 100% additive (B+F)||Spectre in the exit room of The Focus
 * 100% subtractive (B-F) and doubled hit points||All nightmare spectres
 * 25% additive (B+F/4)||Usual spectres
 * }
 * 100% subtractive (B-F) and doubled hit points||All nightmare spectres
 * 25% additive (B+F/4)||Usual spectres
 * }
 * }

Bugs
For issues pertaining to individual maps, please see those maps' articles.
 * A rocket launcher blast originating from a player's rocket launcher shot does not do any damage to them whenever they are facing a corner where the walls are aligned in an angle of 90 degrees. The player must also be facing slightly off the corner's edge and be as close to it as possible. A series of images demonstrating the phenomenon in the Final Doom level Crater can be viewed here: [1] [2] [3] [4]
 * 640K of VRAM is allocated for sprites, wall textures and skies. If this limit is exceeded, then the game will crash and a black screen with the text "TEXTURE CACHE OVERFLOW" will appear.
 * Dramatic memory corruption can be triggered by Lost Souls moving outside the normal boundaries of the levels. Linedefs and sectors in the map will become progressively distorted from their normal layouts until the areas become unrecognizable and eventually the game crashes.

Demo version
A single-level demo version of PlayStation Doom was produced by Williams, both as a stand-alone disc and included into several demo compilations which shipped as magazine issue pack-in bonuses. This demo version contains only. Music and precompiled resources for the other maps are omitted, though the entire IWAD file is present.

The stand-alone version plays a single demo on this level if left idle at the title screen. When launched by the shell programs of the magazine demo discs, this behavior is omitted, and the Williams intro movie is skipped at startup. It is possible to toggle these behaviors by changing the first argument passed to the game's executable file, but the altered disc image can only be run in an emulator or on a console, and the game will automatically exit after the demo is completed.

Reverse engineering
The PlayStation port was used as a base for the Sega Saturn port (with drastically inferior performance), Doom 64, and the PlayStation port of Final Doom. While the actual source code itself is believed to have been lost, Erick194 of Team GEC has reverse engineered the port and released the results on Doomworld, reminiscent of how Kaiser reverse engineered Doom 64.

A port to PC exists, known as PsyDoom. It includes native rendering of the PlayStation's feature set and also includes code from the PSXDOOM-RE reverse engineering project.

Trivia
The pre-release demonstration of PlayStation Doom given by Williams at was introduced with a short stage show featuring the motion capture actors from .