The Neo Geo Does Run DOOM After All

Hackaday reports on two successful ports of Doom to the Neo Geo arcade cabinet—accomplishing what was long thought impossible. The blocker was severe: just sixty-four kilobytes of RAM, nowhere near sufficient for the game's standard rendering approach. The first project, Doom64kB, solved this by cutting deeply: no texture mapping, no save functionality, no music. The second, DoomGeo, chose elegance over compromise: a complete rewrite of the game engine to work within the Neo Geo's sprite-based architecture, using pre-rendered graphics instead of the usual framebuffer rendering. The result suggests something important: it's not processing power that determines whether hardware can run Doom. It's system architecture, and the willingness to fundamentally rethink how the game works.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton