Digital Foundry Retro EX: Doom 64 - Remaking an N64 Classic For PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC

[Maddox]

In a DF Retro exclusive, John Linneman talks with Nightdive Studios about the process of bringing the classic, totally original Nintendo 64 rendition of Doom over to the current-gen platforms. In this video, you'll see what made the original release so fascinating, while Nightdive staff tell all on how the game was reverse-engineered and delivered on current-gen platforms. Oh - and is this the first 1440p Xbox One S game?

Summary

• Video includes quotes directly from Nightdive developers; Samuel Villarreal, Edward Richardson and James Haley
• Doom 64's engine is an upgraded, hardware accelerated version of the Doom engine used in the Jaguar and PS1 ports
• Engine carries over coloured lighting from the PS1 version and is expanded to support a lot more colours, higher res textures, fog and texture filtering
• Features a more dynamic, animated sky box and scrolling textures for water surfaces
• Doom EX (also by Samuel Villarreal) was made by modifying the original Doom engine to conform with Doom 64's differences
• The new official release has been reverse engineered from the ground up based on a disassembly of the original N64 ROM and by referencing a reverse engineering project of Jaguar Doom done by James Haley
• The new release runs at a higher resolution and framerate (duh) but otherwise is completely accurate to the original release including N64 style 3-point texture filtering
• 3-point texture filtering was recreated via a shader. This prevents the use of Mipmaps but the N64 original never used them in the first place either
• Audio in the new release is handled in the same way as the original using dynamic synthesis. Fmod middleware was used to achieve this (as it already supported all the required effects)