Amiga Doom Clones Part 1 - Breathless

For any old Amiga fans out there, here's a look at what I believe was the best of the Amiga Doom clones, Breathless, released in 1995 by a small Italian team called Fields of Vision.

Most Amiga Doom clones actually had what might be termed an advanced Wolfenstein engine. Breathless was the real 2.5 deal, although the engine had limitations. For example, you could have any angle you wanted, as long as it was 90 degrees. Also, it seems there was no unpegging function because any window always has misaligned upper and lower textures. Lastly, flying monsters don't actually fly, they are merely sprites with invisible lower bodies so they appear to float above the ground. You can tell when they climb stairs. It's pretty funny. ;)

Against that, Breathless has freelook, plus a system where you can grab money power-ups to either buy new weapons or boost the power of those you already have. Wise players learned to never buy the flamethrower and instead to buy a Death Machine and boost it. It's important when fighting the Mega-Beings at the end.

Breathless also has a fabulous fog effect, which you can see in the video provided by advancing to about 41:17.

An unusual feature of Breathless is that it's laid out in 4 episodes, called "worlds," of 5 maps each, and each world has a different population of monsters. The final world is a really well-done Aliens environment.

Each map is called an "arena," and you have 3 lives to beat it. There's no saving except automatically at the end of each map. If you fail, you might have to start the entire world over again.

I've tried to contact the lead programmer, Alberto Longo, for permission to make a TC. He didn't answer, but I'm not sure he saw my message, so I'm still trying. ;)

Without further ado, here's an Amiga Longplay of Breathless, the full game finished in a little over 3.5 hours.

At first it looks impressive but skipping ahead it seems there is no enemy and gun variety. There isn't a boss battle either, he just hit a switch and there was a "to be continued" screen. The wall angle limitation totally destroys the maps' architecture, too.

An absolutely barebones shooter IMO. I find this stuff interesting, though, please post more.

One thing's for sure, which I forgot to mention, is that there's no hitscanners in this game, which would please some Doomers. ;)

The ending for the game has always been much criticized, too. The reason for the lack of a sequel was probably the small size of the Amiga gaming scene as 1995 turned into 1996.

Awesome! I had an A500 so couldn't run most of the Doom clones. I remember "Gloom" being quite crap, a bit like Jaguar AVP. My favourite one, which wasn't really a Doom clone at all but deserves an honourable mention, was "hired guns".

VGA said:

At first it looks impressive but skipping ahead it seems there is no enemy and gun variety. There isn't a boss battle either, he just hit a switch and there was a "to be continued" screen. The wall angle limitation totally destroys the maps' architecture, too.

An absolutely barebones shooter IMO. I find this stuff interesting, though, please post more.

You have to bear in mind that the most popular Amiga model had a 7MHz processor and 512KB of RAM; The next most popular, the A1200, basically doubled the CPU to 14MHz and 2M of RAM. Doom 's minimum specs were 486 (=50MHz)/8M RAM. These were still pretty damn impressive achievements.

Moar edits: amusing review by the always-honest Amiga Power, specifically Stuart Campbell (of more recent "Wings of Scotland" fame): http://amr.abime.net/review_1741

Jon said:

You have to bear in mind that the most popular Amiga model had a 7MHz processor and 512KB of RAM; The next most popular, the A1200, basically doubled the CPU to 14MHz and 2M of RAM. Doom 's minimum specs were 486 (=50MHz)/8M RAM. These were still pretty damn impressive achievements.

Not only that, but the most powerful standard Amiga that you could purchase (the A4000) in the 90s never exceeded an entry level 486 in pure CPU performance. Sure, there was a market for 68060 and PowerPC accelerator boards, but it's debatable how much an Amiga running PowerPC software was still an Amiga. Then there was the entire chunky/planar conversion overhead issue etc.

Jon said:

Doom 's minimum specs were 486 (=50MHz)/8M RAM. These were still pretty damn impressive achievements.

That "minimum" spec must have been more of a suggestion than anything, given Doom has managed to run on much slower CPU's than that. Heck, with disappearing corpses and a couple of levels split in half, Doom 2 managed to run relatively intact on the GBA, which only had 16.8 MHz of CPU. Albeit with a modified engine.

MetroidJunkie said:

Heck, with disappearing corpses and a couple of levels split in half, Doom 2 managed to run relatively intact on the GBA, which only had 16.8 MHz of CPU. Albeit with a modified engine.

Actually that was a completely different engine, so nothing can really be extrapolated to the actual Doom one. There's a "legit" (aka true source port) for the GBA though: Ultimate Doom uses the original engine with limitations/cut resources.

Besides, the GBA has some scaling hardware which the very least could help with sprites, otherwise a 16.8 MHz ARM CPU would be blatantly insufficient to run Doom proper (or most other 3D/2.5D engines) at its native screen resolution.

There's an entire thread about Doom's minimum requirements, and it's a well-established fact that the vanilla engine needs a 32-bit CPU architecture and at least a 40-50 MIPS capable CPU (with no less than 4 MB of addressable RAM) if one wishes to run the unmodified linuxdoom source code with the full IWAD resources, at vanilla full-screen resolution. I even came up with a rule of thumb, that the (full) DOS Doom needs about 32 CPU instructions to render one pixel, on average, based on the average performance on a 486.

So with an ARM CPU @ 16.8 MHz (about 1 IPC), since the "3D" view's size is 240 x 128, that makes 30720 pixels...so average framerate would be about 17 fps. Of course, that's without taking into account port-specific optimizations (for one, it's based on the Jaguar version, which is probably a bit more optimized, and designed for smaller static limits).

In any case, with anything significantly less powerful than that, you merely execute the game, rather than running it.

That's probably why they used a new engine for the second one, they didn't have a watered down Jaguar version of Doom II to slap on. I'm guessing the whole sprite scaling thing is similar to what the SNES' FX Chip used.

Jon said:

Awesome! I had an A500 so couldn't run most of the Doom clones. I remember "Gloom" being quite crap, a bit like Jaguar AVP. My favourite one, which wasn't really a Doom clone at all but deserves an honourable mention, was "hired guns".

Love your avatar! :)

Gloom was mighty popular, though, for its wonderfully brutal gibs and its wacky sense of humor. I'll be doing a post on that one in due course.

I have to admit, I can't even comprehend a game like Hired Guns. That is really very complicated, but it shows what an A500 can do graphically so long as the game isn't a texture-mapper..

Jon said:

Moar edits: amusing review by the always-honest Amiga Power, specifically Stuart Campbell (of more recent "Wings of Scotland" fame): http://amr.abime.net/review_1741

Campbell made some good points, but IMO was more brutal than necessary, something for which Amiga Power was famous as the scene died out and they became possibly the single most hated Amiga magazine. I'd personally rank Breathless at 75 compared to Doom. Breathless was inferior to Doom in the quality of its enemies, in somewhat unimaginative level design, in its pace, in its coarse controls (for keyboarders, at least), and was far below Doom in its sheer level of brutality. The inability of flying creatures to actually fly and to attack players from crazy angles is a real problem. There was nothing remotely as dangerous as a Lost Soul in that game. As a result, Breathless is a relatively easy game as long as you don't buy the flamethrower, because many players who did found the ending unbeatable and just gave up. Another big problem for me is the lack of histscanners. I love hitscanners.

On the plus side, it had freelook, which Stuart made fun of in his review but which every 3D game post-Quake features. The fog effect is brilliant, and so far as I know would be impossible to recreate in a TC based on PRBoom. Little things like doors that open in the middle and go both up and down are also cool. The game also includes Doom-style transformative features like lowering floors and traps which are surprisingly absent in many FPS games.

Overall, considering that Alberto Longo had never coded a 3D engine before, and so far as I know, no one on the team had ever been involved in game design prior to this, they did a bang-up job. And having played through it 3 times, it's more fun when you're in it than watching it, because the game has atmosphere plus combat that at least keeps you alert. Those enemies have radical dodging routines that make them hard to hit. There was a single-level demo they once made which was tough as hell, and showed the potential of the game if pushed to deliver more monsters.

I thought I'd ass that I really like the textures in this game. They look a bit smeary because they're running in planar graphics instead of the chunky pixels we're accustomed to, but they are well-drawn and interesting to look at. The Aliens world has some excellent techwall textures with semi-organic aspects.

I also really like the sky textures, especially the green sky of the Alien world and the "8,000 oil derricks" sky in the second world.

Maes said:

Not only that, but the most powerful standard Amiga that you could purchase (the A4000) in the 90s never exceeded an entry level 486 in pure CPU performance. Sure, there was a market for 68060 and PowerPC accelerator boards, but it's debatable how much an Amiga running PowerPC software was still an Amiga. Then there was the entire chunky/planar conversion overhead issue etc.

Good points, Maes.

I have an unusual history for an Amigan. I bought my first miggy in 1997 after I'd already had 2 Macs and a PC. The miggy in question was an A4000T with a 68060 @57Mhz, meaning it was the most powerful "true" Amiga ever released, and this 3 years after Commodore went bankrupt. I bought it as a video workstation for a Video Toaster/Flyer combo, but soon discovered it was way more fun and way more responsive than either my PowerMac or my P166 machine, so it became my main platform until 2003.

Not surprisingly, Breathless ran very well on that machine, though I had to install a special '060 patch to get full performance since it was optimized for the '020 and '030. I was able to play it at full 320x200 1x1 pixel rez, and it looked fab fullscreen on a 20" Toshiba TIMM.

As you noted, Breathless was meant to run on a bog standard A1200 with a 68020 at 14Mhz, basically equivalent to a 286, I reckon.

I was on my 4th playthrough, using the emulator Amiga Forever, when the installation got borked. Once I get all that sorted out, I'll give it another go.

Here's a funny thing. When id released the Doom source code, Amiga versions were released within days, and they often included features found in PC source ports. For example, ADoom offered resolutions up to 1600x1200. Made for a nice slideshow. DoomAttack, my personal favorite, had freelook and, IIRC, jumping. The main point is that the Doom ports actually ran better on my '060 machine than any of the Amiga-based Doom clones. ;D I suppose that's because I had a graphics card, a Cybervision64 3D, and Doom ran on it in native chunky pixel modes. By contrast, Amiga coders had to code for the native planar graphics because so few users had graphics cards. But Doom also ran at least as well as any Amiga clone even on the AGA chipset. The appearance of real Doom on Amiga essentially ended all further Doom clone efforts.

Forgive the derailment, but this thread made me remember this obscure shooter from 1997. Not for Amiga I don't think, but I dunno, it's kind of neat.

Wikipedia says it's based on a modified Doom 2 engine. Weird. Says it came with a level editor. Hmmm.

If it is really based on Doom, I wonder how the map editor works :-D

Jon said:

Doom 's minimum specs were 486 (=50MHz)/8M RAM.

Doom ran fine on 4MB RAM (Doom 2 maps with large open spaces like map29 struggled a bit though). And it would run - albeit sometimes with a stamp-sized screen - on a 386/25Mhz

I got it running on a 385/20. Fucking sucked. I remember my dad installing it and thinking, "This probably won't run well." And it didn't, of course.

Its a nice game to look at, but i doubt it could keep me playing for more than 15 minutes. The textures and rendering both look interesting but the walls or layout seem to be to bland. I never heard of this game before it got mentioned in this thread.

Side note ;
Alien cabal, i always found that to be a damn ugly game.

Yes, Breathless, I remember this one. We used to have an Amiga 500, so this game couldn't work, but I read about it in an old Magazine. I thought it looked pretty Doom-ish from the screenshots. I never played this because we Went from Amiga 500 to directly to PC like many others did. I watched that longplay a couple of years ago.
If you get Contact with the developer, could you please ask if he could also grant a freeware license and/or a source release (if it's not to much to ask)?
About Alien Cabal: It could be a modified Doom II Engine, I read it on a website somewhere. Though the datafile (was it .GOB?) was unopenable in Slade last time I tried so it's certainly not plain WAD format. If anyone knows more about how the game Engine/data format works, I would be interesting in Learning about it.

The .GOB extension sounds familiar, but I just can't pinpoint where I have seen it before. The engine itself looked like a Wolf3D with an outdoors, until I noticed what there were (rare) non-90 degree walls and features, and some really minimal height differences.

In any case, the GOB file itself looks nothing like a .WAD internally.

Edit now I remember where I saw it -in Dark Forces (the first, DOS title), though it doesn't look much like a proper GOB, either, and from the game footage it's really hard to find any Dark Forces engine features.

Hmm, come to Think of it, several older 3D Lucasarts games used .GOB extension to I think. Is this perhaps what you're thinking of? I haven't checked if it's just a coincident or if they're indeed the same type of format.

Well, some other footage better showcases some features like high-res textures, slopes and freelook, though the mapping is really substandard, like a 1994 Doom PWAD on some serious crack.

Could it be a ripped/modified Jedi engine?

I guess it could be though this states otherwise: http://www.philscomments.com/about/
I have no idea.
Dragon Unpacker is supposed to be able to open .GOB files but is unable to open Alien Cabal's GOB file. So it might be more or less different.

Cire said:

Yes, Breathless, I remember this one. We used to have an Amiga 500, so this game couldn't work, but I read about it in an old Magazine. I thought it looked pretty Doom-ish from the screenshots. I never played this because we Went from Amiga 500 to directly to PC like many others did. I watched that longplay a couple of years ago.
If you get Contact with the developer, could you please ask if he could also grant a freeware license and/or a source release (if it's not to much to ask)?

I had an A500 for awhile. Fun machine.

On the issue of Breathless source, it would be 68K Assembly, which is the main reason no one ever tackled it to make, say, a graphics card version. IIRC, the source was actually released in the early '90s in an Italian Amiga magazine, so I'd be surprised if the author objects. My main goal is just to get verified permission to rip all the textures and other elements to allow for a TC release on idgames. There's probably people in the Amiga scene who could rip all that stuff so at least a release on my Mediafire would be possible. But to get that fog effect would require Z/GZDoom, I reckon, limiting the audience. Anyway, I'll make another try this weekend, because I noticed the composer of the game's killer soundtrack posted in the thread. Maybe I can track him down and then get in contact with Alberto Longo.

Interesting. Do you know if the source code from the magazine was ever put online? Did you have any success in making contact with Longo?

I made contact with the author of Alien Cabal, he says that the whole engine is original. He has agreed to send me parts of the source code.

Here's some gameplay from my favorite Aimga FPS, the only really playable one I could find anyway, before jumping over to the Doom... I mean the PC.

1990 baby. Revenge upon Axaro Mey!

Soundblock said:

Here's some gameplay from my favorite Aimga FPS, the only really playable one I could find anyway, before jumping over to the Doom... I mean the PC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22TUoXc8RhQ

1990 baby. Revenge upon Axaro Mey!

This is exactly why I always wondered when a vehicular, mech or flight simulator ceases being that and becomes a FPS.

Incase anyone is interested: https://github.com/CireG/Alien-Cabal-VEdit

What about this:

Cire said:

Incase anyone is interested: https://github.com/CireG/Alien-Cabal-VEdit

Why is it a zip? It can't be browsed or searched this way.

Also, what does Vedit stand for, is it the name of the engine or the editor?

Soundblock said:

-snip-

This reminds me a lot of MIDI Maze which, keeping relevance to the topic, was on the Amiga's biggest competitor.

VGA: I uploaded it as a zip to preserve the original way it was sent to me, but I will also unzip it when I get back home. VEdit stands for Virtual Editor, it's the editor.