Randy Linden Interview (SNES Doom Programmer)

[@n4whhdb]

I used to watch this man code. He would write a function and with lighting-fingers go over it a few times optimizing it completely, drawing on his knowledge of literally how many cycles each opcode would take. It was impressive.

[@paxhumana2015]

So, you worked with him, right?

[@pdiddlyd]

The fact he's releasing the source code has me so pumped. I can't wait to see what people make with it.

[@Cacodemontube]

I am also very excited for it! I also really want to check out those official development tools. They will probably give us more possibilities.

[@jorgefernandomirandamirand3297]

Doom 2 on Snes, Perhaps?

[@ace9346]

@@jorgefernandomirandamirand3297 maybe fixing the frame rate

[@yellowblanka6058]

@@ace9346 There's already a fix - run a source port like GZDoom on nearly any machine made in the last 15-20+ years. I'm sure it took a hell of a lot of optimization to run as it did - even with removal of floor textures, monsters only facing one direction and having cut animation/not moving smoothly through the map etc. Even with the FX chip, the SNES was FAR FAR removed from the average/recommended PC spec for Doom at the time.

[@paxhumana2015]

@@Cacodemontube , I think that someone should have the courage to make a faster bus on a special redone version of the cartridge (think some SD2SNES level trickery), as well as add in all of the cut content, and then have Bethesda release simultaneous ports of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom I, and Doom II: Hell on Earth, with E1M8B, E1M10, the Final Doom, No Rest for the Wicked, and The Master Levels added, and new levels, like E1M10, the PS1/Sega Saturn exclusive Doom levels, Thy Flesh Consumed, Sigil, Sigil II, and all new levels added to Doom I and Doom II, along with a special set of companion cartridges for further episodes for Wolfenstein 3D.

[@Sinistar1983]

I love seeing brilliant programmers show off their games.

[@Cacodemontube]

It was a treat to listen to. :)

[@RichoRosai]

I accidentally found those credits when I was a kid. I couldn't find any information on it online until recently so now I know I wasn't crazy or sleep deprived.

[@TheSuperPlayer707]

We had a Rebecca Heineman interveiw, and now we have a Randy Linden. Just we need a Jim Bagley interveiw and the trinity of unfamous Doom ports were covered.

[@TheSuperPlayer707]

I didn't mentioned the 32X version because it's doesn't really bad, it just feels uncompleted. Also, the unique actual infamous thing about that port it's the music.

[@TheSuperPlayer707]

@spoon Yeah, but the game was cutten off because of the rushes, so that's why the game feels so beta and unfinished. Nevertheless it's more playable than other versions, such as the 3DO and the Saturn versions, and it controls and feels slightly better than the SNES and GBA versions.

[@Cacodemontube]

I wonder if Mr. Bagley would be interested in that or not...

[@TheSuperPlayer707]

@@Cacodemontube he would be... But I think that it wasn't be a good experience, considering how restricted it was the people who want to create Doom ports then, like it was happened with the GBA Doom. It was pretty frustrating to create Doom ports with Carmack putting his hands on whatever you're doing, sometimes the things go well (like it was happened with PSX Doom) and sometimes you had an order of _cease and desist_ in your face, being a great middle finger to all of your work on the game. Bagley was interviewed before, but never focused on his experience in the development of Saturn Doom. Nevertheless, he answered a couple of questions, like the fact that his proto it's lost. It could be interesting to hear a more complete interview about what happened there.

[@kevinedward6132]

Oh yeah Rebecca Heineman's explanation of what the hell happened with that version gave me a new respect for that version, and the wonder of how amazing it could have been if She'd been involved from the very start,

[@bmx7596]

SNES Doom was incredible for the hardware and a big part of my childhood. It helped me escape an abusive life at home even though I didn't have an expensive PC.

[@TheSuperPlayer707]

Randy Linden may be one of the most talented programmers who made a step on the SNES VG development ever.

[@txray3409]

Made a "step"?

[@TheSuperPlayer707]

@@txray3409 Sorry, bad english...

[@TheSuperPlayer707]

@@txray3409 FIxed.

[@yellowblanka6058]

Yeah, damn, writing machine code at 13 - I messed around with Q-Basic/C++ etc. but I wasn't doing low-level machine code.

[@TheSuperPlayer707]

@@yellowblanka6058 well, that's what make this game so amazing. Lots of low level coding telling directly what you want the chips to do.

[@pandaumk3]

Mr. Linden has done a MIRACLE porting Doom on the SNES... some PCs at the time could not even run Doom at 35FPS its original frame rate (hence we had a "shrink screen" option). But this game was the only option some of us had to play Doom without an expensive PC. Amazing work. Great interview! Thank you!

[@yellowblanka6058]

35 FPS was the maximum framerate for the original, most people tended to run it below that, and I would think even a more min spec machine would run it better than the FX2, still, if you didn't own a machine that met the minimum spec, it was probably the best you were going to get.

[@cherokeefit4248]

I got this game in the snes collection. I’m happy to own it.

[@Alexo670]

What an awesome interview, really covered everything you would ever like to know about how to port was made. I really enjoyed the questions also, hearing the whole story and history from him is just incredible. I'm shocked they decided to mess with the difficulty selections and progression for the Japanese release. But what a great thing for speedrunning! lol Great interview cacodemontube, and thanks to Randy for doing this!

[@Cacodemontube]

Thank you for enjoying it! It was a big honor to speak to him.

[@TheFire259]

What a nice guy and intelligent person its crazy for how underrated he is for what he has done.

[@inceptional]

So, SNES Doom could be updated to actually show floor and ceiling textures at some point down the line, since the only reason those were removed was due to memory limitations on the cart. Hope to see that.

[@MeandrLixy]

I have read about SuperFX a little and it's architecture is very interesting one (for me). It hase 16 general registers (also there is a lot of control registers, but it's not important here) R0..R15, where R15 is instruction pointer, R11 - link register and some other specialized stuff. R0 is accumulator by default. But in fact there are two internal registers Sreg and Dreg - they are numbers of source register and destination register. After reset and in the end of execution of instructions which uses source/destination registers they are zeroed, that is are pointer to R0/accumulator. But there are three instructions to change them: FROM Rn ; opcode 0xBn - sets Sreg to n TO Rn ; opcode 0x1n - sets Dreg to n WITH Rn ; opcode 0x2n - sets Sreg and Dreg to n And for example ADD instruction has parameter n in it's opcode like above: ADD Rn ; opcode 0x5n It sums up Sreg with Rn and places result in Dreg. That is ADD Rn adds Rn to R0 by default. But sequence of instructions: FROM R3 TO R4 ADD R5 will write sum of R3 and R5 to R4. Well, this is interesting. Moreover - there is no dedicated MOVE Rn, Rm instruction. Instead of that instruction "TO Rn" works as "MOVE Rm, Rn" if it is preceded by "WITH Rm" instruction. That is "MOVE" is two-byte instruction reusing WITH/TO 1-byte prefixes. Interestion instruction set and I think it's not RISC at all.

[@Shanesshiit]

You missed my question. In the end thought by the time I saw this post all my questions were already asked! Thanks for this! I have been wanting to reboot the snes doom mod, but with the news, way better is going to come, its maybe best left as a memory for the long time fans..

[@hugo-garcia]

This guy is responsible for I been a programmer now. Bleem is what took me to computer science. Seem that in my dreamscast made me want to discover how that thing was achieved.

[@corysama]

github.com/RandalLinden/DOOM-FX The source code has been released!

[@diegoleao]

What a gem of a game and interview, more people need to see this!

[@Dr_Hingis]

What a fantastic man

[@TheFieryWind99]

Yet another treasure of the DOOM fandom!

[@Cacodemontube]

Thank you so much, man! :)

[@randrdigital4259]

I've published the first phase of the source code on GitHub. It's here: github.com/RandalLinden/DOOM-FX

[@vvlist]

Randy, your port of Doom was the first game I ever preordered. I was so excited to get it because I didn't have a computer yet but I had my SNES. Many people here probably don't understand just how amazing it was to see Doom on a SNES back then. Most people here probably have never played on the real cartridge. It was wonderful playing my favorite FPS on my favorite console and I just wanted to say thank you.

[@irishgerman98]

This was such an awesome interview. A huge thank you to Randy Linden for doing this and for releasing the source code for SNES Doom. I can’t wait to see what can be made from this. I would really love to see all of Doom 2 made on SNES as well as some popular classic megawads like Requiem and Alien Vendetta and even both of the Final Doom wads. Once again, thank you to yourself and Randy Linden for doing this. Also, is it ok if I share the link for the source code and tools on a Doom Facebook group page I am a part of?

[@TheFieryWind99]

I think the point of him making a Github entry is that so people can take a look at his code. Also, be wary that the repo is still empty as of now.

[@john2001plus]

30:26 I can only barely remember working on this project 27 years ago.

[@RichoRosai]

Conversely, your name has been stuck in my head for 25 years because I once accidentally loaded the hidden credits but didn't know how I had done it, and it was only now that I could confirm I wasn't dreaming or hallucinating.

[@paxhumana2015]

@john2001plus, @Cacodemontube and Randall Linden also worked on the new and improved SNES port of the game. I wonder if you did as well?

[@john2001plus]

@@paxhumana2015 I left the video game industry 24 years ago. My role was minor, like editing levels, so they certainly don't need me.

[@john2001plus]

@@RichoRosai 🙂

[@PPavel84]

This man is a living legend.

[@ZZKJ396]

Randy Linden, the coders coder. Up there with Carmak in my book.

[@aquelescaraaaaaaaaaa]

Fantastic interview! Best wishes to you and Randy!

[@hossalvarado3838]

Perhaps some modder can add a banking system were the minimum rom size is expanded to 8mb to fin the entire ultimate doom levels and keep the cieling and floor textures off. enemies rotation and enemies in fight is a plus.

[@codecoderr7495]

SuperFX can address up to 2MB because of CPU addressing lines. Basically your idea would work on emulators and SD2SNES but no real cartridges (WS1 LoROM (max 2048 Kbytes) (64x32K) 2.68MHz)

[@ajmx3973]

What an amazing interview, thanks so much for this! I would love to hear more from Randy Linden.

[@pandaumk3]

I am so excited for the source code of the engine and tools... A SFX Doom Port with levels and features on the style of SNES Doom would be amazing.

[@0neDoomedSpaceMarine]

The port itself is incredibly impressive, but more I'm also so very impressed that it actually had online multiplayer. Imagine that, a 3D FPS console game with online multiplayer support, back in 1995, and the console in question is the SNES, of all things.

[@youdj_app]

Randy you are the best!!! big respect for the work!! I was also a big fan of Bleem!!

[@nutrashow]

Amazing video! Never thought I would see something like this.

[@kevinedward6132]

I'd love to see this guy deliver DooM on the Snes without the limitations of those cartridges using modern cheaper storage options, if buy that in a heartbeat. ALL the floor textures and monster angles and everything else

[@Nikku4211]

51:41 Fan Questions Randal Linden should try to do convert over FreeDoom 1, the free Doom IWAD replacement, and maybe even include it with his tools as an example WAD.

[@igorkrugly4842]

Thank you for making this happen!!! It's a dream coming true!

[@Cacodemontube]

No problem. For me it was also a dream coming true. :)

[@turbinegraphics16]

Really incredible, 32x and jag missing textures is a big deal.

[@majola1978]

Vielen Dank an diesen großartigen Menschen und das Team, die dieses Spiel auf dem Super Nintendo möglich machten. Das zu einer Zeit, als sich nicht jeder einen PC leisten konnte und trotzdem, mit einer Kostengünstigen Spielkonsole in den Genuss dieses tollen Spiels bzw. Spielerlebnisses kommen durfte. Ein wahrer Meilenstein in der Geschichte der 3D-Shooter!❣

[@The90sGamingGuy]

Great to hear about the fine details of this port which most thought was impossible. I remember when this port first came out, but at the time i was playing the PC original. Thank you for sharing this with us.

[@SB_Wayne]

I still wonder how those cutted tracks would sound like tho. -I doubt there are included in the source code, but a man can dream.- It was a great listen overall, I'm glad with Randy's responses to my questions (aside from the Reality engine's question that was addressed really early on the interview) and his reaction to my thanks to him really made my day. Great job with the interview, both to you and Randy. c:

[@TheRetroMike]

That was a great interview. I'm so glad to finally have some answers to my questions. I can't believe Mr Linden did everything from scratch without even looking at the original Doom source code. I can't wait to see what's going to happen once the tools and source code will be out.

[@Cacodemontube]

Thanks Mike! Glad you enjoyed it! I gotta say if the discovery of the easter egg wasn’t found a few years ago, I honestly wonder if this little community would be where we now are...

[@MikeDest]

Now i want to see one of those Simpsons wads on SNES

[@IgorAntarov]

What a commitment to make this port possible! Thanks for an awesome interview!

[@josephwj7199]

Awesome stuff! Was happy to hear Randy mention he had the early version, but then was disappointed to hear he sent his prototypes to Alan Binley. Really not a good thing for actual followers of any of the series who actually want to play, document and make great material based on the dev material. That stuff going to him (TheVideoGameProject), it's not likely to be made available or publicly preserved.

[@josephwj7199]

Sadly it's very likely not going to happen. That person who got all this dev stuff from Randy is known in the prototype community for acquiring several protos, including really interesting ones, and keeping it to himself. He's often made it clear that his focus with "preservation" is private archival. The best bet is to ask Randy if he himself could request TheVideoGameProject to release the protos, which would be really cool.

[@mrpopsicleman]

I understand making the Japanese version easier by enabling any difficulty on any level. The thing I always wondered was, in the Japanese version, why were the episode ending texts changed to basically say "You beat the episode. Play the next one." instead of leaving the originals intact? Also, why wasn't the game translated into Japanese? It's still 100% in English (though to be fair, most American developed SNES games were never translated when released in Japan).

[@IanMicheal]

I remember Rand linden thanks for the help at dcemulation.. back in the day i still do dreamcast coding today.. You Inspired me to keep going with coding..

[@paxhumana2015]

Are you the person that is working on the Doom 64 port for the Sega Dreamcast, out of curiosity?

[@David-no7zi]

Best interview I've seen in a long time. Thank you so much for yourself and Randy for making it happen!

[@SomeOrangeCat]

This is like watching a master sorcerer breaking down one of his spells for you.

[@Fuuntag]

Thanks for taking the time to conduct this interview.

[@jamieparkes4043]

Awesome interview,doom was great on snes

[@TheFieryWind99]

Randy Linden has released the 1st phase of the source code on July 14!

[@FB0102]

what a boss

[@launchedkode]

The legend and legacy lives on with snes doom

[@mariomatos2130]

Jesus, I needed this inspiration..

[@aaendi6661]

@9:25. Oh boy even somebody who programmed the SNES back in the day had to deal with shitty assholes shouting "no you idiot, you can't do that, it will cause slowdown!"

[@hossalvarado3838]

Perhaps some modder can add a banking system were the minimum rom size is expanded to 8mb to fin the entire ultimate doom levels and keep the cieling and floor textures off

[@Cacodemontube]

We’re looking into that as we speak…

[@launchedkode]

The holy grail of doom ports for sheer gutsy determination

[@ErdrickHero]

There is a patch on RHDN that allows circle strafing.

[@Jimin-ik6zp]

This guy's a genius

[@bagzhansadvakassov1093]

One of the few times I encounter a human worthy being called Software Engineer.

[@djmips]

This is amazing. I wish I had kept my source code from back in the day.

[@mrbrad4637]

Sames 😩

[@Optimus6128]

59:08 Good! I'd like to see how E4M2 would run on the SuperFX, this one level was one of the heaviest frame rate drop even on PS1.

[@teldrah]

Randy is such a legend!

[@johneysupergd7796]

Randy linden did an abnormal job porting snes doom to the snes, despite it became a medium port, it’s still impressive , and since this used engine does support the superscope,the mouse,rotating enemys and the ability to have textures on floors and ceiling as well as an extra option, i really really can’t wait till hack gonna uncover everything out of that game engine and ,even if that will require the superfx 2 chip to be overclocked and patched to accept biggers rom files then 2MB or putting a 16MB rom in it and devide it into sections of 2MB and load them one after the another one intothe 2MB rom chip of the superfx2 chip to get around that limitation as well(cluster chain file system) As randy linden said, the snes version has the most content,heck even the GBA version was a lazy port with content missing.

[@amaiorano]

This is a great interview, nice job! My only suggestion is to not play any background music throughout. It's distracting, and sometimes a bit loud.

[@augustusvonwatts555]

Thank you for this video. I fondly remember doom snes because I couldn’t afford a computer as a kid

[@thogameskanaal]

He wrote games in raw byte code? I mean, I guess it's possible, but damn... That's tedious. Just modding a Gameboy game to play nice with my emulator was ready a hassle, imagine coding an entire game with just hex values... Much respect!

[@atsz.]

I hope DEH support is added, this can enable so many more wads to be converted, particularly TCs

[@bleurgh]

Great interview

[@fosterfostan5593]

Dude is a legend! This is what a graphics programmer should be not some dudes who cannot even optimize their shit (Blair witch . The medium) to run at acceptable performance!

[@tango7580]

awesome!!!

[@Jonas-km4qx]

Such a cool dude!

[@inceptional]

Has anyone ever asked Randy how far he thinks he could have pushed the SNES version if most of the limitations imposed on him due to time and cartridge sizes were taken away? I mean, I would looove to see what kind of version we could get to if he or someone like him were to continue to develop the SNES version today and really push the FX2 to its absolute limits as well as being able to use much bigger catridge storage sizes now too (possibly a faster framerate for example, save states, proper circle-strafing, morel levels, the additional enemy directions, monster in-fighting, etc).

[@yellowblanka6058]

Eh, I think he probably did the best he could given the fact that this is running on a cartridge co-processor and SNES hardware - remember, this is a cheap commodity console with a on-cart co-processor vs. your average multi-media PC costing (in early 90's dollars) $2000+ - a larger cart isn't going to give the SNES 8MB of RAM, a 486 CPU etc.

[@bg048]

The source code is out now!

[@olexiypylypenko1249]

Wow, thank you for this interview! This is wonderful! This video is an important milestone in a Doom history. Also, mr. Randy is such a sweet man.

[@Cacodemontube]

No problem! It’s great to help the Doom community out with this. And Randy was very pleasant to talk to. Great guy!

[@johneygd]

I remember once i saw doom on the snes, i was sooo excited about it, however once i later found out that this version lacks textures on flours and ceilings and allso had no rotating enemys, i slowly started to get very disappointed, HOWEVER ,it’s good to know that this reality engine does support rotating enemys,textures on flours and ceilings as well, etc,,, Now if i will see a hacked version of doom with textures on flours and ceilings aside from walls, i will be more convincing about the super fx 2 chip. Also i got 1 question to randy linden,,if a battery save system was too expensive then,WHY NOT PUTTING A PASSWORD SYSTEM INTO IT INSTEAD????

[@johneymute]

WOOOOW So randy linden created convertor tools to convert those graphical data and midi data into a snes format, And while reality engine was created from scratch but he took inspiration from source codes of it online, Also it’s cool to know that the reality engine does support rotating enemy’s, textures on flours and ceilings,the mouse and the superscope, i don’t care if 2 giant levels has to be trade off in order to have those features builtin, Am also stunned that he did NOT used the mode7 from the snes itself but instead for some reason just used mode7 trough software via the superfx2 chip, But how about those backgrounds,as those still done by the snes or are those done by the superfx chip 2 as well?? I personally was impressed with the snes port(especially at first glance)but it was a medium port but non the less still impressive, Now i know the 16mb superfx 2 carrtride was very expensive, but i was thinking what if randy linden opted for a ST018 chip (wich was a 21mhz :32bit arm chip used in 1 snes game,albeit just a 2D board game) he may would have not only a more powerful chip to easier port doom to it but also may would,ve more memory to work with to put all extra stuff in he would like, Non the less i just really can’t wait to see snes doom modders pulling everything out of that reality engine, even if that will require a patched fpga superfx2 chip to except more memory,,,,or use a cluster chain format to swap the 16mb ram with new data everytime that fx chip reaches it’s point and so on to get around that 16mb limit, So we can put for instance a 64mb rom devided into 4 sections and load one after the other 16mb section of it into ram once needed, In short i see huge huge potential in this🙏🙏🙏👍👍👍

[@yellowblanka6058]

AFAIK the ST018, while fairly powerful, was not designed around polygon primitive rendering like the FX/FX2, so the FX2 was probably ultimately the best choice given the demands of a game like Doom. Regardless, no enhancement chip would match up to a 386/486/Pentium in PCs at the time - and these CPUs alone cost more than an entire SNES.

[@ErdrickHero]

Serial to SNESpad? I would have expected he used the SNES serial port for something like that.

[@igorkrugly4842]

So, it's been 1 month since the interview. Still no source code released...

[@jc_dogen]

probably still trying to work out license issues

[@markussteinbacher8807]

What toolchain I need on PC to build the source for the snes ?

[@codecoderr7495]

IIRC Randy said there are some missing pieces, not from the Toolchain, but assets to build from original sources. There was no permission from Doom copyright owners to distribute these, thus, a legal workaround has to be made to build the game from ROM file. Also you need a VM machine because it's a Toolchain developed to work with an Amiga. Keep in mind these sources were developed initially on Amiga PC. Then later Randal got an official Nintendo devkit, so had to redirect the codebase to work with it. As I can see, it takes some work to merge codebase with Nintendo devkit with the Amiga PC codebase, and these tools may or may not be written yet.

[@markussteinbacher8807]

@@codecoderr7495 I see. Thank you for the answer. What an effort to code all development thingies on the amiga without the internal knowledge from Snes back then ... I used to code and assembled my demos for C64 on my amiga too and send it via printerport to the userport of my c64 so I know this technology. The PC was to expensive back then for coding only ;-)

[@kevinedward6132]

Snes was my first version of DooM... and even now looking back it's the best console conversion from all the main ports... OK the graphics resolution was low but the levels were mostly faithful to the PC and other than the floors and ceiling textures, most textures were represented in the game... the other ports all look very very bland by comparison even if the resolution is higher. Even to this day I still try to access to Fortress of Mystery level using the SNES method, it's just locked in my brain and completely inaccurate for every other version lol

[@Curlyheart]

Lol same, someone should make a wad that puts the fortress of mystery entrance into refinery in the base game.

[@tabsntoot]

The gamesmaster

[@inceptional]

When are we actually going to start seeing some of the fruits of this. . . .

[@abdulabar4964]

go to an asylum and stop pestering devs

[@ErdrickHero]

"Today games take up to a gigabyte" Has this man only played indie titles for the last several years?

[@GustoTheGamer]

GBA version what about that?

[@playoffl36ron8]

looks like he's in jail from the thumbnail

[@yellowblanka6058]

"These days games take up to a gigabyte"....heh, he hasn't really played games in a while, has he?

[@ewanmonty6227]

So true. Even a smaller game today takes up like 10ish gb. Its pretty crazy.

[@NoSpamForYou]

Legendary