A new year brings a brand new interview from GamingReinvented. The interview was with Randy Linden, who was part of the team that brought Doom to the SNES. At long last, we now have some insight on what it was like to work on the project. There were challenges that Linden had to face, as well as content that they had to remove from the game. Both topics of discussion were brought up in the interview. Here’s what was said:
GR: And what was it like being a programmer on Doom? What challenges did you have to overcome to get it working on the SNES?
RL: I started the project independently and demo’d it to Sculptured Software when I had a fully operational prototype running. A bunch of people at Sculptured helped complete the game so it could be released in time for the holidays.
The development was challenging for a few reasons, notably there were no development systems for the SuperFX chip at the time. I wrote a complete set of tools — assembler, linker and debugger — before I could even start on the game itself.
The development hardware was a hacked-up StarFox cartridge (because it included the SuperFX chip) and a modified pair of game controllers that were plugged into both SNES ports and connected to the Amiga’s parallel port. A serial protocol was used to communicate between the two for downloading code, setting breakpoints, inspecting memory, etc.
GR: Any features you wish you’d wanted to include but couldn’t get working here?
RL: Sure! More levels for starters — Unfortunately, the game used the largest capacity ROM available and filled it almost completely. I vaguely recall there were roughly 16 bytes free, so there wasn’t any more space available anyway!
Fascinating!
Wow! The lengths they went to to develop that weapon!