It seems strange that the news that Quake is to be released on the Amiga coincides with the time that Doom finally makes its way to the Amiga.
After an endless supply of Amiga doom clones in response to 'They said it couldn't be done...', we finally get the original, the game that many were said to buy a PC for.
This came about when ID made the source code to the Linux version freeware. Needless to say, Amiga coders took up the challenge (not having to worry about legal problems, unlike Quake), and there are currently 5 different ports of Doom for the Amiga. As well as the executables, you need a Doom WAD file which is about 1.8MBs in size.
Returning to Doom; I've tried ADoom, PSIDoom, and DoomAttack. DoomAttack is supposed to be the fastest out of all five of them, and indeed, on a 50MHz '030, it is playable at full screen (about 8-10 fps). The author has rewritten parts of it in assembler, and future versions should be even faster.
It seems kind of strange seeing Doom on my machine after seeing it so often on a PC or Playstation. It may not be as fast on my machine as a Pentium, but then that's to be expected. I expect it would fly on an '060 - and I wonder if anyone will take up the challenge to port it to PowerPC Amiga?
It has to be said - Doom is a great game! IMO better gameplay than the Amiga Doom clones I've seen, and faster too. It seems strange that this should occur just before the release of Quake on the Amiga. Quite possibly, seeing just how good Doom is (and at no expense) may persuade more people to buy Quake - it is a pity that many have said that Quake, in gameplay terms, is not as good as Doom. I also wonder about the soon to be released Genetic Species; as great a Doom clone it is, I fear that many potential purchasers will not bother buying it if they have got the 'real' Doom for free - but then again, they might always buy another Amiga game instead.
Alive Mediasoft were working on a transparent Mac emulator to quickly be 'ported' to the Amiga - how well this will work remains to be seen, and it is still uncertain whether they will be able to licence the Mac ROMs - Apple have hardly been giving out licences recently, have they?
Mark