Doom has famously been ported to just about everything imaginable, but not all ports of ID Software’s megahit first-person shooter were made equal. Both releases of Doom on Sega’s fifth-generation home hardware, the 32x and Saturn, have long been regarded as sub-optimal experiences, though for quite different reasons.
Fast forward to today, and the narrative around these once-maligned pieces of software has done a complete 180°. The spectacular Doom 32x: Resurrection project transformed the 32x release into arguably the best version of the game on a 1990s console, and now, the Saturn is receiving its own re-envisioning thanks to the latest version of fafling’s “Doom fix patch.”
“It’s more or less twice as fast now compared to the commercial release.”
— fafling
The patch is only applicable to the Japanese version of Doom. Why that one? “Because in terms of program it’s the latest one,” fafling said. “I intend to support the other versions later on, but for now that’s Japanese version only.”
Fafling first dropped their “Doom fix patch” on SegaXtreme as part of the SEGA Saturn 29th Anniversary Game Competition in January 2024, finishing eighth place in the “Hacks, Patches and Translations” category. This version saw numerous audio and visual improvements but failed to meaningfully address the game’s notoriously poor performance.
Version 0.2 of the patch, released April 10 on SegaXtreme as a submission to the SEGA Saturn 30th Anniversary Game Competition, is a substantial iteration on the groundwork laid out in 2024. The improvements included in the two patches are far too numerous to list but are available on the patch’s SegaXtreme resource page.
See v0.2 of fafling’s “Doom fix patch” in action below:
Fafling has also posted a side-by-side comparison of the retail release and their patch versions:
“The biggest offender that I fixed just a few days ago is a systematic screen frame lost at the end of each game frame,” Fafling said on the SegaXtreme Discord server over the weekend. “It’s due to a mismatch between the frame switching code of SBL and the vsync code of the PSX version.”
For those more technically minded readers, here’s a screenshot of fafling discussing their approach in more detail:
Doom came to the Sega Saturn in March 1997. This variation on the well-regarded and commercially successful November 1995 PlayStation port of the game was completed by Rage Software and published by GT Interactive. However, Saturn owners were subjected to some all-too-familiar compromises that plagued multiplatform releases of the day, including a lack of true transparencies, poor optimizations resulting in inconsistent and overall low framerates, along with missing or reduced visual and audio elements.
For more on the Sega Saturn port of Doom, check out SegaLordX’s video here.
wow! I’ll have to get this update; I was just getting comfortable with the current patch from january. The dev scene here is really doing remarkable things.