It's been a week or two since I brought you any news on the state of the Doom ports. Well, since then a lot has been happening.

There are now 7 different ports in active development, of which two are for PPC machines. All of these are moving along very well and are not only giving all of the features of the orginal Doom game to Amiga owners but also adding new features which haven't been seen before.

Out of the seven ports that are available now the most popular is ADoom. This along with DoomAttack has the fastest 68k engine, it also contains the unqiue features of being also to play the game on a higher screenmode. While all the other ports and the original Lunix source only allow play in a 320x200, ADoom allows you to play the game in resolutions upto 1600x1280, this looks absolutely brilliant but is slow even on an 060.

Most of the ports are now at such a stage of optimisation that they are easily playable, full screen on a basic 030/50MHz. Some of the higher ADoom resolutions are also playable on this spec machine allthough at least a 040 is recommended.

Since Doom is alomst virtually made up from something called a WAD file, there have been many commercial and PD WADS created. All of the Doom ports allow you to use these. The Doom2, Final Doom and Ultimate Doom WADS are all reported to work, as are many of the free WADS that are available on the Internet. This virtually gives you a number of different games in one.

Below is a quick run-down of each Doom port, to decide which is best for you it really would be best to try all of them.

AmigaDoom

Download:- amigadoom-1.10.lha [635k]

This was the first Doom port to appear. The early bugs that were in the port to start off with have been removed and it is now looking very good. However, it unfortunalty requires ix-emul and RTGMaster to run.

ADoom

Download:- ADoom- 1.1.lha [391k]

This is, in my opinion, the best of the lot at the moment. It one of, if not the fastest port available (Maybe just bettered by DoomAttack). It allows you to use both low and high detail modes, fully supports music and also allows you to choose the resolution that you run the game in. As of the latest version it also supports DeHackEd files.

AmiDoom

Download:- amidoom.lzx[326k]

This was the fourth of the ports to appear and is progressing along nicely, I haven't given this one much of a look myself, however, I'm told it runs quite nicely.

PsiDoom

Download:- psidoom-0.8.lha [391k]

This port only appeared quite recently. It's still pretty basic as features supported goes, it doesn't support music and doesn't allow play via joystick or mouse.

DoomAttack

Download:- DoomAttack.lha [694k]

This is probably the fastest port currently available on an 030. A very nice feature of this port is that it contains a nice prefs program that allows you to configure the game without having to result to long cli arguments.

The other two ports (ZhaDoomPPC and VDoomPPC) are for PPC machines only and since I haven't got a PPC, I haven't been able to test these, however, I'm told they are very fast.

There has been a WWW site set-up that not only contains all of the ports currently available but also all of the files that are needed to run them. It is updated daily with news versions being put on there as soon as they are released. You can access this site by clicking the link below:-