Sony PlayStation



The  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 truer to the original, but it was done at the sacrifice of accessibility.

John Romero is quoted on the back cover, calling this the "best DOOM yet," and is credited as "Creator of DOOM".

It was followed shortly by a port of Final Doom, reusing the same engine and most custom resources.

Gameplay


The rendering engine has been rewritten to utilize the PlayStation's 3D hardware. This renderer allows enhancements such as higher color depth, alpha blending and colorized sectors.

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 similar, although less changes. Overall, this means that the number of unique textures per map is lower than in the PC version. Further examples of simplifications would be the omission of crushers in Ultimate Doom and the reduction of large vertical heights. These changes are done mainly for performance reasons; however, there is still noticeable slowdown in certain levels, particularly when playing on the higher difficulty settings.

The game features fewer enemies compared to the PC version:


 * Several bad guys such as the baron of hell, mancubus, cyberdemon and spiderdemon appear less frequently.
 * 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, and the final level "Redemption Denied" instead contains one or two spiderdemons, depending on the skill level.
 * As the corresponding secret maps are missing, the game lacks the Wolfenstein SS and Commander Keen enemies.

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

Further differences between PlayStation and PC version

 * 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 320x240 via rasterization. New graphics were made for the menu and intermission backgrounds, fonts, and status bar to fit this resolution.
 * New ambient background music for most levels sequenced using the PlayStation SPU's capabilities. Additionally, Redbook CD audio 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.
 * The sound effects are different from the PC version, and were later reused in Doom 64.
 * The PSX SPU's reverb features are utilized, both for sound effects (mainly in enclosed areas) and soundtrack.
 * All weapon sprites have been reduced in size. The Super Shotgun 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.
 * 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.

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, contrarily to the Jaguar's big-endian WAD.
 * The Doom PLAYPAL is different on multiple points:
 * Color values are stored as 16-bit little endian ABGR values (using the most significant bit for alpha 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.
 * 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 rather redundant. 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

 * A rocket launcher blast originating from a player's rocket launcher shot does not do any damage to him/herself whenever he/she is 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.