Doom Retro

Doom Retro is a source port for Windows PC. It was first released on December 10, 2013 by Brad Harding to coincide with Doom’s 20th anniversary. A description of the project given on that day by its author follows:

"Doom Retro is the classic, refined Doom source port for Windows PC. It represents what I want Doom to be today, in all its dark, gritty, unapologetically pixelated glory. It’s a meticulously crafted expression in restrained design. I’ve strived to implement a set of features and a certain level of attention to detail that isn’t necessarily present in other source ports, but still upholding a deference for that classic, nostalgic Doom experience we all hold dear."

- Brad Harding

Doom Retro’s source code is forked from Chocolate Doom with enhancements from other Doom source ports, as well as several original ideas. It is deliberately minimalist by design, and does a few things differently when compared with other source ports. It supports “Vanilla” and “limit removing” WAD files, but in order to implement certain features, and due to the nature of Doom demos, demo recording and playback have been disabled.

Doom Retro is singleplayer only. It runs in Windows XP and up, and in Linux under Wine.

General features

 * The limits of the original Doom are either raised or removed completely.
 * Support for DeHackEd files and lumps, including those with BOOM extensions.
 * Specific support for Chex Quest, HacX and episodes 1 and 2 of Back to Saturn X.
 * A majority of the bugs from the original Doom have been fixed.

Game play enhancements

 * More blood and blood splats.
 * Corpses react to blast damage, and smear blood as they slide along.
 * Cacodemons have blue blood, and Hell knights and Barons of Hell have green blood.
 * Objects are partially submerged, and the player’s view lowered, in liquid sectors.
 * Randomly mirrored corpses.
 * Several hundred level-specific fixes are applied to repair problems such as missing or incorrect textures, stuck monsters, etc.

Graphical enhancements

 * 640×400 resolution, which is twice the resolution of the original Doom, and accommodation for any screen size while maintaining the correct 4:3 aspect ratio.
 * Widescreen mode with optional heads-up display.
 * Windowed and fullscreen modes, switchable at any time using.
 * Ten darker gamma correction levels to accommodate for today’s brighter LCD screens.
 * Alpha, additive and per-pixel translucency effects.
 * Dynamic shadows.
 * Brightmaps.
 * Various rendering improvements (such as less "firelines" and slime trails, the removal of "sparkles" along the bottom edge of doors, better drawn floors and ceilings, changes in height are drawn more accurately, tweaks to the status bar, and a better and more consistent fuzz effect for spectres and the partial invisibility power-up).
 * Significant changes to automap (dynamically updates, a rotate mode, scaled thing triangles, wider solid walls and drawn over other walls, lines don’t glitch along edges of the screen, secrets drawn correctly as they are discovered).
 * Several improvements to monster animations.

User interface

 * Convenient built-in WAD launcher.
 * Better keyboard support ( keys are set by default, can toggle autorun, and the  key is disabled).
 * Better gamepad support ( and controllers supported, haptic feedback for XInput controllers when the player is injured or fires a weapon, controllers can be connected/disconnected mid-game).
 * Better mouse support (higher allowable mouse sensitivity, no vertical movement, use the mousewheel to change weapons).
 * Updated help screens.
 * Several improvements to the menu and message systems.
 * Support for BMP-format screenshots at native resolution, without limit to the number of shots saved.