Atari
From DoomWiki.org
The 16/32-bit Atari ST home computer platform was popular during the late 1980s and 90s, but it was widely considered that it was not possible to do a game like Doom on this platform due to technical restrictions of the standard machines.
The 1987 first-person shooter MIDI Maze for the Atari ST introduced networked multiplayer deathmatch over five years before Doom.[1] It also received a port of the Amiga game Corporation in 1990.[2] The Atari STe saw a number of attempted shooters, including the Doom inspired Hellgate in 1996 written in STOS BASIC, as well as the commercial Gouraud-shaded Substation in 1995 and the texture mapped Destruction Imminent in 1996.[3][4] A version of Wolfenstein 3D was also ported in 2005.[5][6]
The abortive Atari Falcon however saw a demo in 1997 called Running, which presaged the arrival of a number of proper source ports of the more architecturally advanced Doom and even Quake.[7][8] The Falcon was swiftly discontinued in favor of the Atari Jaguar console, which did receive official versions of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.
More recently, a closer Doom-like is being developed called Grind for the Amiga, with support also being worked on for the Sega Genesis and stock Atari ST.
Contents
Ports[edit]
Ports for the Atari Falcon include:
- Doom (Atari Falcon) (1995-1998)
- PmDoom (1998-2015)
- Bad Mood (1995-Present)
Additionally, there was also "Doom Emulator Engine" which was released prior to the official source code release, which appeared to be based upon a leaked version of the Doom source code.
A demake of Doom for the Atari 8-bit computers, derived from the earlier vicdoom codebase,[9] was released in 2023 entitled ADoom.
Performance[edit]
As with the Amiga ports, a high specification of Atari is required to run the ports which are largely based upon the official source code. This limits these to only working on Atari clones such as the Hades, Milan and Medusa, or on highly accelerated Atari Falcon machines with upgrades such as the CT60/CT63.
Bad Mood has many optimizations tailored specifically to the Atari Falcon, and also has support for Atari specific hardware and so is able to run on much lower specification hardware. This however restricts it to only the Atari Falcon.[10]
Tools[edit]
As part of the Bad Mood project, a native version of DEU was produced in 1995. GEM-DEU was ported from the original DOS version of DEU, however had a lot of Atari specific extensions to allow it to fully use the GEM windowing environment.[11]
A native WAD tool called FalconWadTool was also built for the Atari Falcon to allow viewing and extracting / adding files to WADs.
Running[edit]
Running was a sprite based first-person shooter demo for the Atari Falcon released in 1997, serving as a proof of concept for Doom clones on the system.[12][13][14]
References[edit]
- ↑ Davison, Pete (17 July 2013). "Blast from the Past: The Dawn of the First-Person Shooter." VG247. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
- ↑ Cobbett, Richard (20 May 2023). "Before Doom, before Wolfenstein 3D, why does nobody remember one of the first first-person shooters?" PC Gamer. Retrieved 21 July 2024.
- ↑ Atari Legend (13 November 2019). "First person shooters on the Atari ST (Wolfenstein 3D, Substation, Hellgate, Destruction Imminent)." YouTube. Retrieved 11 July 2024.
- ↑ Leigh, Peter (16 July 2016). "Doom Clones – The Good, The Bad & The Ugly." Nostalgia Nerd. Retrieved 10 July 2024.
- ↑ ST Graveyard (2 October 2019). "Reimund Dratwa Interview." Atari Legend. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
- ↑ (16 March 2016). "Wolfenstein 3D." Atari Crypt. Retrieved 4 July 2024.
- ↑ Heikkinen, Tero (4 August 2019). "Atari Falcon 030." Old Machinery. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
- ↑ Mandin, Patrice. "Ports - Games." Patrice Mandin's web site (archived 🗺). Retrieved 14 July 2024.
- ↑ itvbadmin (2 February 2024). "25 First and 3rd person shooters to rock your Atari 400 Mini." Into The Vertical Blank. Retrieved 23 July 2024.
- ↑ Bad Mood - Doom into Atari Falcon 030
- ↑ GEM-DEU (way-back machine archive)
- ↑ Lauppert, Theodor. "Running." Astoria Games (archived 🏛). Retrieved 14 July 2024.
- ↑ petsasjim1 (17 June 2017). "ATARI FALCON RUNNING DOOM CLONE HATARI 68030-32 MHZ 1997 RDT Volker Konrad DUKE NUKEM FPS ELEMENTS." YouTube. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
- ↑ "Running." Zeden.Net. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
