i had no clue they licensed NeXT OS on PCs, that's awesome info. What are you doing now?

I had a very similar emotion to seeing Doom for the first time as well. I’d personally played other 3D games on DOS before (Stunts by Brøderbund and Battlezone or some clone of it), but nothing that played as smoothly. And texture-mapping on DOS! I’d never been exposed to an Amiga, so I saw this technique for the first time inside of Doom. This was my Sistine Chapel, and I had just stepped into the Renaissance.

I remember too... I had played Wolfenstein... it was pretty cool... But Doom was something different... Something Magic... It was definitely a Shift in the Paradigm....kind of like seeing the original Star Wars in the movie theater, and or hearing Eddie Van Halen play Eruption for the first time... It achieved a new standard, and we have never looked back

OMG. Same here. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. It was like having a virtual reality machine that opened into a hellscape universe sat on your desk. I'd played a lot of arcade consoles and other games, but this was just another level of Wow!

@@nickk5948I had a 386sx at the time, yes the sx stands for "Sux"... all of my friends had just started college and were getting 486 PC's for CAD etc... saw a copy of Doom run on one of them and all bets were off... worked two jobs to save up to build my own 486 PC within 3 months at half the cost... NEVER looked back!

Oh yeah, I love how you call it "a portal to hell". My friend had such a portal, guarded by his angry dog 😅 I had to wait each time until he locks the dog away.

another pro tip: Record the audio with a microphone not a potato.... good content though..

@@tokero5199 Indeed! 😉😎

@@tokero5199 Agreed! 😎👍☮️

​@@tokero5199any specific recommendations, or...?

We’ll be less sneaky next time, we promise! Thanks for the feedback :)

🙂🙂😔🙂

At least put your notes/script next to the camera. It's still often noticeable but not as obvious.

There's teleprompter apps on mobile devices, at least.

I still have two of them in my demo room. Great machines. So sad their legacy is disappearing. Objective-C was all fun and games until Swift hit the fan.

Yep, talking with him was a lot of fun, and we’re all looking forward to hearing more from him in the future! You should check out his book: Doom Guy. It goes into a lot of detail about not just technical details of Doom, but also much of what made John Romero into the person who created DoomEd.

Those were the days. Doom hackers guide, poorly documented editors, and the enthusiasm of a 13 year old. Doom is perfect.

Us too! We’re so glad that the original id folks were so open with their level methodology and data! So many developers got their start through game modding and/or editors that shipped with the engine. While shipping DoomEd would not have been practical, we’re glad they at least didn’t kneecap the ability for others to make editors by making level data inaccessible.

We’ll give it a shot! Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks! And thank you for all your advice + support!

Thanks for fact-checking and the correction! We also shouldn't have forgotten about Catacomb 3D, the other 2.5d game that id worked on with texture mapping before Wolfenstein! We internally had a discussion about if the data representation/movement system being 3D was necessary for it to be considered 3D, or if rendering in 3D was enough for it to be considered 3D (hence the "attempt 3D"). Definitely could have used more discussion on this point though! With everything going on at the museum, we missed some things on this first video. We've added in that correction in the description and will aim to be more accurate next time! Thank you!

Yeah, I remember playing the demo of Underworld the day it came out. The whole first level. I can't overstate how amazing it was. Ability to look up and down, walk under bridges and over tunnels. Jump. By the time the real game came out we had memorized the first level. I also remember Doom (also memorized the first level demo) and loving how it was simpler but faster paced and a very different world. Loved them both for what they represented and what they were able to do within their philosophy.

Doom is 3D because you move in the X,Y and Z axis. Even if it's using this weird in-between 2d and 3d rendering techique for speed. Doom is 3D but with limitations I would say. :D

Thank you for the note! We’re constantly seeking to improve!

Thank you! We'll do our best to make more videos as we make our way through our physical collection and bring more artifacts to life!

I thought he meant the guys were tools lol

Thanks for the feedback! There's so much about Doom that we wanted to talk about, but not enough time. We'd love to explore those in a future video (especially DPaint)!

Agreed, stopped quiet suddenly. Really cool video. Ready for more!

There's videos of Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop. Also the book "Doom Black Book" has pictures.

​@@TheMADEOakif you arent dead you still have time

Thank you!

Too bad that human expectations scale with the environment. 3 dimensions are the end of our plane of existence, so there wont be a next step to get excited about in this term.

Thanks for your support over the years! I'll take your branding notes to the volunteers making the videos!

There are so many fascinating things about the NeXT. While RenderMan was developed at Lucasfilm prior to being purchased by Steve Jobs (what later became Pixar), it found its way into NeXTSTEP as a framework called 3DKit: www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/ReleaseNotes/3DKit.htmld/index.html. If you’re into 3D graphics, it’s really fun doing some header diving and finding references to technology that would finally be implemented decades later.

Thanks for the background! You seem to know a lot about this; would you be interested in being on our podcast if we did a deep dive into something related to this topic in the future? A lot of folks take it for granted that this history is easily accessible, but it really isn't. For instance, this is the first time I've heard about the StepStone compiler. As time passes, the folks who've used it become rare, and crucial links to the past are lost. Either way, I appreciate you providing us with one more connection point to the past!

@TheMADEOak sure. I'd be happy to. If I have any memories that are useful, I'm happy to share.

Thanks for the feedback! We’ll work on improving our audio for the next video!

Thanks! It was a lot of fun for us to get it working both in a VM as well as on the original hardware.

We hope so! Thanks for watching!

It is definitely quite compact! On top of that, there are some interesting hardware design decisions you'll spot if you have the chance to use one. (For instance, the keyboard and mouse plugging into the monitor, a single proprietary cable that delivers all power and I/O communication from the main board to the monitor, and a single power cable that extends from the main board's power supply.)

We’ve been reading John Romero’s “Doom Guy” over here, and it goes into a lot of detail over the use of Interface Builder on NeXTStep to very quickly build user interfaces. If you’re familiar with macOS development (pre-SwiftUI) you would definitely notice some of the similarities! The UNIX networking capabilities and their influence are also evident in the quick note about Carmack’s exploration of distributed objects in the book prior to implementing IPX within Doom. I highly recommend this book from both a narrative and technical standpoint; it’s such a gift to get the story straight from one of the creators!

Having been a pretty active NeXT user (who worked for a NeXT 3rd party developer that shipped SW for NeXTSTEP) at the time, I can tell you that id definitely used NeXT systems as a part of the development process, and they actually produced a version of the game running on NeXTSTEP--which likely wouldn't have happened if it had sat unused in the corner. I fondly recall running DOOM on my NeXTstation Color back in the early 90s.

Thank you! There will be more!

Aw, thank you! We hope to have more time to explore our topics in the future. In the meantime, we have to get consoles working in our museum so that people can spend less time watching us, and playing the actual systems!

I'm pretty sure Elite was even earlier than that, although it may have been ported to DOS, but I dunno. I only know about it being a Commodore 64 game or something.

@@costelinha1867 oh yes, the original version was for the Acorn Electron and BBC Micro in 1984 before being ported to just about anything, including the NES.

Thanks for the fact-check! We’ve added in a correction in the description to reflect this at 2:50, and will review more closely in future videos!

Thank you for your feedback; we'll take that into account! And thanks for watching! Hopefully there's more time to explore our source material in the future to go into more detail on the other aspects.

Thanks for the feedback! We’ll be looking into different ways to prompt our presenter to be less distracting!

Agreed! We hope to have more opportunities to explore Doom more deeply in the future. That being said, we highly suggest Fabien Sanglard's Game Engine Black Book that goes into much more detail than our video here: fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/

The NeXTStep footage was taken from a VM, so there is some lag. However, if you try to run Doom on the physical NeXT hardware, it’s actually pretty slow as well. From our conversation with John Romero, it makes more sense to compile a FAT binary to a location on a network file share, copy it to a DOS machine, and then run it directly on the target hardware. As for the lack of color, the NeXT box that we had didn’t support color graphics. Most likely, the folks at id would have had a NeXTCube with NeXTDimension cards in them. So they would have been able to at the very least visually check that everything was working directly on their machines. I highly recommend Fabien Sanglard’s: Game Engine Black Book DOOM. It goes into incredible technical detail, and served as the inspiration behind this video. There’s so many more game development nuggets to mine from this!

@@TheMADEOakI’ve seen a video of Doom on NeXT (one with colours). It had a pretty good frame rate, actually.

@@peterfireflylund Ah! Yeah, it must have been running on the NeXT Cube. That one was specced out better than the NeXTStation we have in our collection. According to Fabien, the NeXT Cube was what John Carmack/John Romero used (along with the card supporting full color), so it makes sense that the machine you saw had a better frame rate. Thanks for the input! We'd love to get one of those in our collection and see the differences.

Doom runs fluidly on my OPENSTEP 4.2 Mach PC (I.e. white hardware), but it uses a 800 MHz P-III processor which is much faster than anything that existed while id were developing the game (on black hardware)

Congrats! I’m personally looking forward to the 68040th like!

Yep! A bunch of us at the museum are the same as well--that's why we're so thrilled to have the chance to learn from folks like John who readily share their knowledge and source code with the world!

I saw Romero streaming some doom map he was making or something just a few weeks ago. I wouldn't be surprised if anyone making a video like this could just ask him questions these days and get a response like that.

We had him on our podcast! art19.com/shows/the-madecast/episodes/e3ebf894-1be0-40ea-a726-47a0f55968e6 Check it out for the full audio.

@@delphicdescant Yep, John Romero is awesome and truly wants to inspire the development of video games as an art form!

The audio interview comes from our podcast with John Romero, I’ll link them in the description as well! art19.com/shows/the-madecast/episodes/e3ebf894-1be0-40ea-a726-47a0f55968e6

@TheMADEOak That's awesome! Thanks for sharing, and for your whole mission. Great stuff.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to compile the game from source! As far as the computer goes, I personally feel like VMs are close; if you’ve never used UNIX before (like I hadn’t before using a Mac) and are developing software, the change is dramatic. There are some quirks with the hardware itself (power button on the keyboard, proprietary cable from the box to the monitor), but the experience outside of the operating system is generally the same. We definitely recommend trying to program an application on the emulator to get a feeling of what it was like!

Noted! Thanks for the feedback!

Thank you for that constructive criticism! Seems easy enough for us to do!

Yep! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_binary#:~:text=Fat%20binaries%20were%20a%20feature,%22Multi%2DArchitecture%20Binaries%22. On NeXTSTEP, the compiled binary could immediately run on both x86 and on Motorola 68k platforms. That’s why it was as simple as compiling to a networked file share and running directly on a DOS machine! The editor code didn’t intermingle with the engine code, so there were no issues with library dependencies. With Apple’s acquisition and adoption of much of OpenSTEP, this style of development can continue to be seen today (develop on one chip architecture to be deployed to multiple chip architectures).

Thanks for the note! We've added in a correction at that time in our description. We'll work much more closely on accuracy on our next video!

Yep! And if you download DoomEd and run it on NeXTSTEP, you’ll find that it uses a similar file/directory structure to the way that macOS applications are structured today (except without code signing so you can mod the app in very insecure ways :) ).

@@TheMADEOak that is so awesome :) thanks for sharing this info

@@TheMADEOakwell next step was turned into macOS after they was bought by Apple so it should not come as a surprise :) MacOS is kind of a reskin of Next Step

Hah, maybe! We have two NeXTStations, but iirc, the cube belongs to one of our volunteers who let us borrow for this video.

They did have visual interfaces for DOS. Windows 3.1 Windows 95, Windows 98 all ran "on top" of DOS.

Because it started out as just text. That was what it was. Then you run whatever software you wanted on it. And as said in this thread. Early version of Windows Was run on DOS. there was other window based GUI system for dos. Just google it and you will find plenty info

That's a great question! Writing an operating system is extraordinarily tough. You're building the system that allows all of the different hardware components to talk to one another. Your mouse and your keyboard are going to have to send movement data to the computer and put that data somewhere that an application will be able to access for the monitor to grab it and display it. When they both get plugged in, they need to identify one another and establish an understanding of what it provides and what gets access to it. Your hard drive needs to know how to move data to RAM so that the CPU has access to it, and your RAM needs to know how to use the hard drive when it runs out of space. Now, imagine that you had a language, but it only consisted of two letters, and no punctuation (spaces, apostrophes, etc.). We'll call our two letters 0 and 1. How can you make words? You don't even have spaces with just those two letters! So, perhaps we can make a fixed length "chunk" of 8 letters each. We'll call this a "byte". Now, we have the ability to make the letters of the English alphabet by mapping the chunks of 0s and 1s to letters. For instance, "S" is 01010011, "T" is 010100100, "U" is 01010101, and so on. These are called chars! Check out this chart: cs.smu.ca/~porter/csc/ref/ascii.html What does this have to do with why early operating systems were text based? Well, at the fundamental level, processors work with only two "letters": 0 and 1. Yes, you could probably build *the entirety of your operating system* on a different operating system, but it would at the very least require that you reboot your machine and change your boot drive *every single time you needed to test something*! Wouldn't it make more sense to create an environment where you could write software, and then test if it worked without rebooting? You're already pretty close if you use that trick above by making fixed chunks of 0s and 1s into sequences of letters! Then, you can develop your UI systems right on the computer you're using, and it'll be much faster and more rewarding! And thus, the command line was created. So, why would Doom have a user interface but not the rest of the operating system? Doom has "game UI" but not general UI for the entire operating system. While difficult, it's a much simpler problem! They didn't have to think about how you access your files, how you see what devices are hooked up, and everything else you take for granted in UI-based operating systems! And you'll find, even with these user interfaces, most "true" operating systems will provide a way for you to get right back to the command line so that you can continue to build software on your computer. So, basically, operating systems start with the command line because you should always start from what you need rather than what you want! (Fun fact, in the case of Doom, it actually did make more sense for Romero/Carmack to develop on the NeXT precisely because it had a UI development system that was highly flexible, and could build to two different architectures! While they weren't building an operating system, this is one of those cases where it actually made sense for them to build on a different platform instead of on their hardware they were deploying to.) I'm glossing over *a lot* here, so any folks who can correct me/provide more insight, please do so! At the MADE, we're all here to learn!

🌌

Thank you for the note! We’ll work on that for next time!

Thanks for the note! We'll work to correct that in the next video.

Woot! We have to get unDoomed at some point ;)

Quite true! The elegance of the wad format was partly informed by its need to be portable across platforms (Motorola 64k/x86)--ie the level data needed to be separated from game logic. While not completely novel, the distribution of this practice to modders really helped proliferate this as a best practice! Great notes on this from John Romero's "Doom Guy" book.

I am, of course, not John Carmack, but: NeXT uses a 68x00 processor, whereas DOS uses a x86 processor, so using a virtual machine wouldn’t have been possible; using an emulator would theoretically have been possible, but in practice far too slow - eg., at that time to run DOS software at full speed on a Mac a card containing most of a PC was used

​​​@@youdontneedtoseehisidentif4939 SoftPC from Insignia allowed to run MS-DOS on NeXT hardware (and MacOS 68K, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX and more). It was first released in 1987 for SPARCstations and no doubt worked for a lot of applications, though gaming with it would be tough. The NeXTSTEP version for x86 (not yet availabe during Doom's development) ran much faster due to using the same architecture, but even the original 68000 Amiga 1000 already offered the Amiga Transformer software PC emulator for DOS, running e. g. Lotus 1-2-3 at the speed of a 300kHz 286 (usually ~12MHz), slower than the original 4.77MHz IBM PC 5150.