FastDoom: DOS Vanilla Doom optimized for 386/486 processors

But the automap always show the status bar, that has nothing to do with screenclocks. I added an extra screen block to show the mug yes but i don't remember how i did it right now. xd

Not in FDOOM. And yes, RUDE shows how minimalistic HUD is a very good concept. Shame there is no DOS build.

@AnotherGrunt for now you can use MBF 2.04 for DOS, it has support for a minimalistic HUD. What do you think of combining the minimalistic HUD of MBF with the doomguy face? Or better something like the HUD of text modes?

BTW you can use whatever you want from FastDoom :D

20 minutes ago, viti95 said:

for now you can use MBF 2.04 for DOS, it has support for a minimalistic HUD.

Which is exactly what I'm doing, but unfortunately MBF2.04 (or EE) isn't so fast.  I had to use it, so I noticed a missing HUD. FDOOM these days is just way to go ;-)

20 minutes ago, viti95 said:

What do you think of combining the minimalistic HUD of MBF with the doomguy face? Or better something like the HUD of text modes?

Don't forget these are patches and they have to be drawn and redrawn every frame. This is why HUD has a background. It is irrelevant in MBF2.04 because it isn't targeted at low-spec PC but I feel FDOOM should be better. This is why I suggested one patch. Of course, drawing keys/ammo or whatever would be better but if so again somehow, I don't know…minimalistic. And fast. Text is better because it is just printf() as fast as it gets.

It's your port, so the choice is yours. Just keep in mind the name: FastDOOM.

A small update on how will look the mini HUD

How about adding support for multiple soundcards at once? Give Doom the ability to use a soundblaster card for left audio channel and a covox lpt device for the right channel? Or how about using two lpt dacs for stereo support and another sound card/synth for the music?

Support for multiple soundcards for surround sound could be another really cool addition to the game. Two stereo cards, front left/right and back left/right. Or possibly the normal soundcard for front/left and a lpt dac for mono back.

Ideally you'd need to be able to define X amount of sound cards and which channels they play back and mix accordingly.

It depends on the sound card combination, but yes it's doable. Stereo covox support is planned as it's very easy to implement (two parallel cards on two different ports). The main problem is that the library is designed to have only one sound "device" and one music "device", thus it would require a major rewrite of the sound library. For now my idea is to add basic support for WSS and AC'97 sound cards, later we'll see what to do.

Also I'm waiting for the LPTSND X2 to be released, as it supports stereo on a single LPT port. With two of those it's possible to have 4 channels on 2 LPT ports.

What, the ancient knowledge of Stereo-On-1 has been lost already ?!

A very period correct way of processing sound would be encoding for Dolby Pro Logic. That would add a center channel suitable for player sounds and a mono rear surround channel. This is encoded into a standard stereo signal, so any stereo sound card can play back this type of sound. You need a suitable receiver to then decode the signal. The processing will probably eat some cpu cycles, but not that many judging by the specs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Pro_Logic

The well known demo Second Reality has a Dolby Surround soundtrack: https://youtu.be/iw17c70uJes

28 minutes ago, zokum said:

A very period correct way of processing sound would be encoding for Dolby Pro Logic.

Also very period correct would be to act very impressed when hearing about it, then looking at your generic BPC (Black Plastic Crap) boombox or all-in-one sound system, and then just drooling with jealousy :-)

Unless you lived in that era, it's easy to forget how any kind of advanced-ish or too dedicated consumer electronics tended to be quite expensive, especially if they were digital and/or about sound processing. The devices themselves also tended to be bulky and heavy, usually the size of a standalone cassette deck. It's not like today where you can thrown a cheap DSP/arduino board/Android app behind everything and call it a day.

1 hour ago, Maes said:

 

Also very period correct would be to act very impressed when hearing about it, then looking at your generic BPC (Black Plastic Crap) boombox or all-in-one sound system, and then just drooling with jealousy :-)

 

Unless you lived in that era, it's easy to forget how any kind of advanced-ish or too dedicated consumer electronics tended to be quite expensive, especially if they were digital and/or about sound processing. The devices themselves also tended to be bulky and heavy, usually the size of a standalone cassette deck. It's not like today where you can thrown a cheap DSP/arduino board/Android app behind everything and call it a day.

Dolby Surround receivers weren't very pricey in the mid 90s. One rarely had it as a standalone device. It usually came integrated into a 5 channel amplifier. Usually two regular stereo channels, and 3 extra low power channels for center and surround. A complete setup with speakers and receiver would be less than 500 USD.

13 minutes ago, zokum said:

Dolby Surround receivers weren't very pricey in the mid 90s. One rarely had it as a standalone device. It usually came integrated into a 5 channel amplifier. Usually two regular stereo channels, and 3 extra low power channels for center and surround. A complete setup with speakers and receiver would be less than 500 USD.

Dunno what your intention was here, but that is a quite big QED for what I wrote :-)

You're picturing a scenario where somebody would shell out the extra $$$ and rack space, just for a dedicated amp-ceiver, and ran a setup of standalone components (cassette deck, CD player, TT etc.). Most people would have to make do with a (sub-)$100 BPC boombox/all-in-one I already mentioned (provided it had line inputs, that is). And we're talking 1980s/1990s $$$s here.

In other words, it was a typical 1990s luxury feature not many people had.

Uh no. These are extremely common pieces of kit. Loads of people had these when I grew up. Hook it up to a CRT tv and you got reasonable low budget home cinema. Used these days such a receiver is around 50 USD. I never had a CD player, I used my PC cdrom. My cassette deck was a donation. So all I had to buy was the receiver and speaker set. You could probably get much cheaper used sets than the one I bought.

On 10/14/2021 at 7:02 PM, viti95 said:

A small update on how will look the mini HUD

 

Knowing what one is what would be a good idea, though.

Maybe add some color to them? Red for health, Blue/Green for armor (to help denote the type), ammo can remain yellow?

On 10/15/2021 at 1:02 AM, viti95 said:

A small update on how will look the mini HUD

Holy Guacamole. Best HUD I've ever seen. It is released or it will be released?

On 10/16/2021 at 3:40 PM, Dark Pulse said:

Maybe add some color to them? Red for health, Blue/Green for armor (to help denote the type), ammo can remain yellow?

No, no. Health (numerical value) isn't important and remaining ammo as well. There is no graphical representation for armor so I guess this value is important.

4 hours ago, AnotherGrunt said:

No, no. Health (numerical value) isn't important and remaining ammo as well. There is no graphical representation for armor so I guess this value is important.

Point is I have no idea what the numbers represent, just 174 of something, 38 of something, and 140 of something.

I thought ammo, but ammo would be four numbers, not three, so I surmised that one is a "current ammo" counter, one is a health counter (presumably the 38, based on Doomguy's face), and one is an armor counter.

5 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

I thought ammo, but ammo would be four numbers, not three,

I am probably just dumb but:

Ammo is 3 numbers.

5 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

 

I love how i can't remove this on mobile.

The new mini HUD is pretty much completed, it will be available in the 0.8.8 release. The three shown values of the HUD are the following:

• Ammo (current weapon)
• Health
• Armor

I can't modify the colors of the numbers as i'm using the same font as the arms / ammunition counters and they are available only in yellow color, and all the translated color drawing functions were removed.

BTW i've added a new feature to show the current framerate on the debug port (0x80)

17 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

I am probably just dumb but:

 

 

Ammo is 3 numbers.

Bullets, Shells, Rockets, Cells. That's four types - I'm not talking about the number of digits in the ammo counter. I shouldn't have used "numbers"; I meant it in the sense of "number of types."

Hence why I thought "It can't be an ammo counter," or at least, not the ammo of all ammo types, hence I surmised Current Weapon Ammo/Health/Armor (which proved to be correct).

15 hours ago, viti95 said:

The new mini HUD is pretty much completed, it will be available in the 0.8.8 release. The three shown values of the HUD are the following:

• Ammo (current weapon)
• Health
• Armor

I can't modify the colors of the numbers as i'm using the same font as the arms / ammunition counters and they are available only in yellow color, and all the translated color drawing functions were removed.

Mmm, that's kind of tricky then, as presumably you also can't just slap a letter in front of them, either. Meaning people will have to literally memorize what number is what value.

Kind of drawing a blank on how to make that clearer. And as this is a port all about speed at all costs, presumably there's going to be nothing like loading an internal WAD that would add colored numbers to display or whatever.

You could just hardcode a glyph in the code. A percentage behind armor and hp would indicate those, armor first/top, health middle and ammo at the bottom.
 

198%
 98%
221

Something like that.

On 10/19/2021 at 6:16 AM, zokum said:

You could just hardcode a glyph in the code. A percentage behind armor and hp would indicate those, armor first/top, health middle and ammo at the bottom.
 

198%
 98%
221

Something like that.

You'd still have to know which one is armor, but to be fair, that will be more or less evident since any new game isn't going to start you with any armor.

That said, I'd put health first over armor.

New release ( 0.8.8 ), this is the changelog

• Added new video modes
  • FDOOMC16.EXE => FastDoom CGA 160x100 and 16 colors
  • FDOOMV16.EXE => FastDoom VGA 160x200 and 16 colors
  • FDOOME.EXE => FastDoom EGA 640x200 (dithering 16 colors)
• Added support for Sound Blaster Direct mode. This mode doesn't require IRQ nor DMA, but it's a bit slower and limited to 8-bit mono sound. Useful for PCMCIA clone cards and problematic cards/systems.
• Better CGA 320x200 and 4 colors support
• Added new screen size with a minimalistic HUD
• New command line parameter that allows showing the FPS via the debug port 0x80 (-debugPort)

As always it's available on GitHub: FastDoom 0.8.8

I've released the mini HUD as shown in previous pictures, i've delayed too much time this release and wanted to release it as soon as possible. I have to think how to make it better without adding extra resources nor taking extra processing time, but for now it's very useable.

I've always thought of it as armor and health, armor is the first line of defence. It's also alphabetical :) The order doesn't matter much though.

My opinion: There is absolutely no need to show any number at all. They just confuse user/player anyway. At least I can see how much HP I have in fullscreen. Thank you @viti95

On 10/23/2021 at 9:44 AM, zokum said:

I've always thought of it as armor and health, armor is the first line of defence. It's also alphabetical :) The order doesn't matter much though.

Well, one kills you when it reaches zero, the other doesn't. Pretty important to know which of those two numbers is allowed to reach zero, and which one you want to avoid reaching zero. :P

A small development update, FastDoom now supports ATI Small Wonder 640x200 (16 colors) mode. It's very slow, the 8-bit ISA bus is the major bottleneck here.

The same card running on Plantronics Colorplus mode (320x200 16 colors) it's much more playable. And it's faster than EGA 320x200 modes.

Can I use an altered version of your Saturn Fuzz effect for my GBAFreeDoom port?

Also if its ok maybe I could ask to have it merged into DoomHack's GBADoom which my port is based on.

@RetroGamer02 yeah for sure, you can use it and merge it wherever you want :D

On 10/28/2021 at 12:41 PM, viti95 said:

A small development update, FastDoom now supports ATI Small Wonder 640x200 (16 colors) mode. It's very slow, the 8-bit ISA bus is the major bottleneck here.

 

...

 

The same card running on Plantronics Colorplus mode (320x200 16 colors) it's much more playable. And it's faster than EGA 320x200 modes.

 

...

Hmm....isn't the ISA bus used in both cases? If we take the "by the book" theoretical bandwidth, assuming a 16-bit bus, then at 8 MHz there should be a theoretical bandwidth of 16 MB/sec, and even half that (Hell, even a quarter of that) should be plenty enough to support updating 64000 pixels 35 times per second, even with the "generosity" of assuming 8 bits per pixel.

No deny that EGA and CGA cards tended to be shit-slow, but the ISA bus's bandwidth alone couldn't be the only cause. What about wait states/write delays? Maybe the bottleneck is more in the interface chips/constraints?

Exactly what does the Plantronic Colorplus mode do differently? From what little specs I could find laying around, they extra modes were also bit-planar, so no possible advantage of a chunky display....

Edit: well, by watching the video they both actually look like slideshows, quite short of what -theoretically- could be done with the available bandwidth.

@Maes It probably isn't ISA bus speed itself but how transfer instructions are structured. Look at this. Is it really done by 8-bit ISA transfer?