Some Things Done the Hard Way

In the midst of “MARCHintosh” the Snow emulator’s home page pointed to “Doom for the SE/30.” I was a bit tickled by this latest example of “Doom being ported to unlikely hardware,” although when I checked out the project I saw it required more memory than my own SE/30 is equipped with. The certain emphasis on “MARCHintosh is a chance to work with real hardware” did somewhat diminish thoughts of at least trying the port in Snow itself. In the end I did get around to playing two levels inside the emulator, noting how many graphical (and audio) features were turned off or pared back to move a game intended for relatively high-end PCs of 1993 to a 68030-powered computer (“laden down by more operating system overhead,” as I can imagine some saying) that had been supposed “premium” back in 1989. A bit later on, the port was developed to the point of also running on colour Macs, and I resorted to Snow’s IIcx emulation. It was a little easier to make things out there, but I was also reminded of how my family’s LC II had to disable almost every bell and whistle in Marathon to run that “Doom clone” (from a certain detached and dismissive perspective) at any semblance of speed. (The question is whether “the LC II was just as compromised a ‘low cost’ machine as its predecessor” was outweighed by our having put an accelerator card into it not that many months after we’d got it.) In any case having to run this program in an emulator rather than on genuine vintage hardware kept me thinking it would be just as easy to launch a modern Doom port and have all the features working.
( To a semblance of productivity )