Gloom on Commodore Amiga 1200 vintage home computer, with 68060 cpu.

[fuaburisu]

Technically speaking this is more a clone of Wolfenstein than one of Doom. There weren't stairs or windows if I remember well. AlienBreed 3D was a clone of Doom, and even better as it had water pools with an animated water surface, as well as multiple floors on the same vertical space, which neither Doom or Doom 2 had. AB3D ran at less than 10 FPS on my A1200 though. :p

[nathanallan1]

Love Doom clones. Does this one have a keyboard/mouse control option? Even with a very good Genesis controller keyb/mouse work better for me. Also, would love to snag an A1200, very rare in the US.

[SteveBenway]

@nathanallan1 There's no keyboard/mouse control option, sadly. That would've made the game much more playable. It was joypad or keyboard only.

[guv859]

Great death screams, too. Much better than the generic ones everyone uses now.

[SteveBenway]

@guv859 Yes, there was some real tongue in cheek over enthusiastic voice acting here :)

[IWillCureYouAll]

@SteveBenway The majority of the sounds (doors opening, screaming) are sampled from Aliens. I can hear Bishop screaming away watching this video...

[guv859]

I'd forgotten all about Gloom. I'm wishing I had it now. I'm going to have to get a copy.

[GodofLegacy]

if i remember rightly, i had a version of this game (gloom Deluxe) and im pretty sure it ran at full screen at 1x1 pixels on my 030 40mhz amiga 1200 (litte jerky tho) so i used to drop the screen down a bit.. but on an 060 processor your amiga should be able to easily play this at max settings, other games that ran well (reading other comments) Breathless, AB3dII TKG, Citadel (ran good on stock amiga) Fears, and death mask? these where well before the likes of napalm, genetic species etc...

[DjNicksy85]

i used to love this game and play it all the time.

think u need some more practice tho! lol

good vid

[SteveBenway]

@DjNicksy85 Oh yeah, I definitely need more practice. On all of my videos, I just put the game on, play and record, with no practice at all... and usually having not played the game in years, if ever at all.

[DjNicksy85]

@SteveBenway oh right, cool. used to love gloom, aint seen it for years untill now. cheers for the vid!

[madcapoperator]

Got this for 99 pence off ebay, hopefully it will run on my unexpanded A1200 without any problems :)

Ideally i'd like Gloom Deluxe but its rarer and probably wouldnt run nicely if at all on my Amiga

[meowmmmmm]

"It cant be done, this is one of those games that proved them wrong!" OK, a 68060 CPU is far from a stock A1200, and during the A1200 retail availability, a 68060 would have cost a fortune.

Twelve years ago I could download an MP3 in under a second, and even though it could be done, that was at work with a $35K a month T3 line connected to a Sun Enterprise with 1 Terabyte of Ram. Show us 3D games on the 1200 with the stock 68020 CPU. Doom clones exist on the Falcon 030!

[SteveBenway]

@meowmmmmm Doom clones (including this one) can be done on lesser Amigas, they just aren't as nice to play. The point I was making was that at the time, people said it couldn't be done on an Amiga... period.

The Falcon would obviously be more capable at this type of game. It has a DSP chip. It's like comparing apples with oranges.

[meowmmmmm]

@SteveBenway I'm just being awkward. :-) Maybe one day, an enterprising group will build a hybrid Atari / Commodore. I'm thinking the Falcon 68030 and DSP / Sound Hardware, the Atari Jaguar Custom 3D graphics chip, the Amiga AGA graphics and workbench, and all clocked at 3.2GHz.. Not forgetting Ram, Wifi, USB, HDMI and stuff. Oh and have built in Basic with new commands for all the hardware so us old timers can program games and stuff. Now that would be cool, and dirt cheap.

[SteveBenway]

@meowmmmmm I'd buy one :)

[richardmaudsley77]

@meowmmmmm And technically impossible, and proof that you should shut up.

[br1sban3br1sban31975]

Damn these atari users. I have both Amiga 1200 and Atari Falcon and I have to say the amiga is the more capable machine. The atari does have DSP over the amiga, however the amiga ruled the rest. I have to say the amiga can do most things better than then Atari falcon, only idoots would stated the atari is more capable. Looking at the specifications of the atari Falcon, it is a piss poor attempt to compete with the amiga 1200. Amiga will always rule.. Atari will suck forever!!!! Fact!!!

[JasperAbraxxious]

@meowmmmmm : Gloom is a TERRIBLE example of this. It was written to be playable on a stock 14 mhz 68020 A1200, thats why it is soooo chunky and not full screen.

Gloom deluxe has 1 to 1 pixels and is full screen, and shows the weapon at the bottom of the screen - like Doom. Gloom Deluxe runs smoothly on a modest 68030.

Dooms runs well on an 030/50 at full screen. Breathless and Genetic Species have far better graphics than doom and both run on an 030/50.

Look up the crumby Doom on Atari.

[CrotchConfidence]

@meowmmmmm I played gloom on my vanilla A1200, that only had an 020. It played fine, just a bit chunky, you could put it in hi-res mode but that gave you a tiny letter-boxed window. Still, groundbreaking stuff at the time, then AB3D came out and everyone creamed their jeans. Good times.

[amigapoika]

This is only reason why I would like to have an A1200 :D I'm still very happy with my A600 and A500's

[HeLLVaderous]

pity that this computer was not continued :( There were the best games!

[SteveBenway]

@HeLLVaderous I totally agree. If Commodore hadn't dropped the ball, gaming and computing might be very different today.

[kolakube123]

@SteveBenway

If commodore had not committed suicide with terrible marketing (understatement) they would be the Apple of today!

[SteveBenway]

@kolakube123 Sadly true.

It wasn't just marketing though. Pretty much all their top level management decisions were stupid. Like investing most of their capital in Windoze compatible PCs, and cutting investment in the Amiga, when the Amiga was their best seller. Or compromising the design of the Amiga 4000 because they had a load of cheap PC cases which didn't quite fit the 4000 motherboard in its intended form.

[kolakube123]

@SteveBenway

Not to mention the terrible 500+ model what was followed up with the worse 600. I mean how do you make the 500+ worse?? They managed it.

If they released the 1200 in 1990 or even 89 (hell they had 4 years to do that if they did) and were more focused as you rightfully say Id still be an amiga user to this day.

Just think how far ahead the 500 was on launch. I wonder sometimes did Bill Gates secretly buy Amiga out to run them into the ground.

[LeeDarkParadox]

hey this game looks like it plays better & faster than similar games for the sega saturn ((hoho)), really impressed with the speed of this on the a1200 !!

[dreamcastII]

very good video

[CLeRKSfan4life]

Never heard of this but it looks pretty cool. Graphics look like Doom on it's lowest setting but they still look decent.

[fsm1982]

This game is like Super Contra, very like.

And appear a Arcade in first person shooter. To me is not a clone of Doom and is a Original Game.

[BastetFurry]

Doom looked better and ran on a fscking 386 DX40.

[storerestore]

And this is able to run quite smoothly on a processor less than half the speed, with no chunky pixel graphics mode available. You have to keep in mind that the Amiga was made with superior sprite/playfield oriented 2D graphics in mind, while the simple frame buffer oriented design of VGA was perfect for this type of game.

[68040E]

yeh this isnt really doing gloom justice, the engine looked blocky and awful back then til we got deluxe.

[harleykman]

The videographer calls it "chunky and pixelated", but so too were all the other computers and consoles of 1993.

If you don't believe try playing Doom or Wolfenstein on a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis/Megadrive emulator. They look even worse than this does.

[68040E]

The original gloom looked terrible, deluxe was a totally improved engine

[telemetry9]

good game that.....

[ruutiveijari]

Why is the aspect ratio like that?

[SteveBenway]

I don't really know.

The game has an option to tinker with the resolution, and when you set it to the highest option, it goes into that weird, tall, narrow window. If you set it to full screen, it goes back to an ultra chunky low resolution again.

[Paperclown]

@SteveBenway: are you using a modern LCD to play these games? I asked you about borders in another one of your video and this or borders on bottom is what I meant.

If you are not using a 15khz display to display low resolutions is why. The standard PAL resolution was 320x256. which btw looks GORGEOUS on a 15khz or arcade monitor. Hires is a line double mode of 640x256 and your super-vga monitor cant do these low. Any of your consoles will look amazing on a an old 15khz / RGB / Scart display

[SteveBenway]

@Paperclown Yes, this is on a widescreen LCD TV.

There would normally be borders on the TV if I set it to maintain a normal TV aspect ratio, but in this game they are bigger, as for some reason the game has been made with a vertical aspect ratio.

I have an Amiga multisync monitor and games really do look great on it. I can't use that for recording videos though, as the recorded image has too much flicker.

[Rockythefishman]

damm I always always wanted to play this. However my amiga would never run it.

[RLMAudio]

well the reason i ask is...all motorola 68k processors (even the megadrive/genesis) were in fact 32-bit, but were bottle necked by 16-bit address bus. However, from the videos you have shown of the amiga games, it seems like that issue is resolved. Either that or they have the most clever game programmers in the biz lol!

[SteveBenway]

Ah, yes, I'm with you now.

From the 020 onwards, they all had 32bit address busses.

The programmers for the Amiga, especially towards the end of it's life, were very clever. They were helped by it having standardised hardware, unlike the PC... so they could hit the hardware directly, rather than having to go through the OS. This allowed them to pull off some very clever tricks.

[harleykman]

It's also worth adding the a 68060 is equivalent in power to the Original Pentium at 100 megahertz, so that gives you an idea of the '060 power relative to today.

[RLMAudio]

steve,

did the 68060 cpu have a 32-bit address bus? Just Curious...

Rich

[SteveBenway]

I don't know anything about address busses, but I do know that all the motorola chips from the 68020 onwards had 32 bit architecture.

The 060 was the first to feature multi-threading, which was nice.

It had around the same processing power as a Pentium 1, though sadly, very little software made use of its more advanced features.

[ancalimonungol]

As far as I remember 060 has 64 bit address bus. It also needs t have pairs of equal RAM to run in accelerated mode.