{"id":547807,"date":"2026-07-13T17:45:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T17:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/547807\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T17:45:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T17:45:11","slug":"hackers-quickly-prove-that-neo-geo-doom-ports-are-not-impossible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/547807\/","title":{"rendered":"Hackers quickly prove that Neo Geo Doom ports are not “impossible”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, we passed along Modern Vintage Gamer\u2019s (MVG) confident assertion that Doom is functionally impossible to run on the Neo Geo<\/a>, owing to the console\u2019s sprite-based display hardware and lack of a frame buffer. We all should have known better than to tell a dedicated group of hackers that something is \u201cimpossible,\u201d though, as two recent projects have made great progress toward functional Doom ports on stock Neo Geo hardware.<\/p>\n

Both of these projects have significant graphical compromises that limit how viable they would have been for a marketable, \u201990s-era console port, as MVG lays out in a new video<\/a>. Still, they stand as a testament to the surprising results that clever, determined coders can coax out of legacy hardware.<\/p>\n

It looks like Doom if you squint<\/p>\n

To create the Doom64KB<\/a> project for the Neo Geo, coder FrenkelS adapted an earlier Doom port<\/a> they designed to run on 16-bit PC processors like the 8088 and 286. Using that engine, the Neo Geo code then makes a kind of proto frame buffer out of the console\u2019s fix layer<\/a>, an area of display memory that\u2019s usually used to display menus and HUD information on top of gameplay.<\/p>\n


\n \"\"
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

If this is what Doom usually looks like to you, consult an eye doctor immediately.<\/p>\n

If this is what Doom usually looks like to you, consult an eye doctor immediately.<\/p>\n

Credit:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Doom64KB<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

By rendering to this fix layer, the Doom64KB engine can animate a relatively smooth version of Doom maps, albeit one that uses chunky, 8\u00d78 pixel tiles at an effective resolution 28\u00d732 (and just 16 colors, limiting the \u201clight diminishing\u201d effect as walls recede into the distance). A slight modification of the same idea builds a frame buffer from the Neo Geo\u2019s sprite memory, increasing the effective resolution to 80\u00d756 by using 4\u00d74-pixel blocks. While that increase comes at a noticeable cost to frame rate, things could get smoother with further optimization or with overclocked hardware like that on the upcoming Neo Geo AES+<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, we passed along Modern Vintage Gamer\u2019s (MVG) confident assertion that Doom is functionally impossible to run…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":547808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,80],"class_list":["post-547807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/547808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}