Yesterday Kweepa launched the final version of DOOM64 on Itch.io, an ambitious demake that marks the second entry in his planned id Software conversion trilogy for the Commodore 64. Having previously squeezed a version of Doom onto the even more limited VIC-20 using off-axis walls, Kweepa shifted focus this time around. By ditching off-axis angles, he managed to redirect the C64’s processing cycles toward rendering dynamic height changes for floors and ceilings. To capture the look of the 1993 classic, the game implements lighting changes by refreshing the system’s 40×25 text display with dithered shading patterns. Full texture mapping was explicitly abandoned to prevent a muddy, low-resolution appearance, a rather interesting optimization choice that freed up precious system memory for custom lookup tables, enemy mipmaps, and a native soundtrack.
The technical wizardry continues, where maps were crafted frame-by-frame on a grid using a custom editor equipped with instantaneous preview tools to balance elevation and shadows. The game’s weapons utilize hand-tweaked, re-paletted, and rescaled sprites originally sourced from the PC shareware release. On the audio side however, the creator has said that sounds are taken from the original PC speaker effects and have been decimated, which worked for the VIC-20 version. Commodore 64 owners looking to test their mettle against the forces of Hell can grab the game in two distinct flavors: a standard version optimized for modern emulators or hardware fastloaders like the C64 Ultimate, and a Krill-powered alternative tailored specifically to maximize disk speeds on a bone-stock, unmodified C64 setup. The package is topped off with a sleek loading splash screen illustrated by digital artist Paul Docherty (d0kk!).
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Original article by www.indieretronews.com
