Hackers quickly prove that Neo Geo Doom ports are not "impossible"

Last month, we passed along Modern Vintage Gamer’s (MVG) confident assertion that Doom is functionally impossible to run on the Neo Geo, owing to the console’s sprite-based display hardware and lack of a frame buffer. We all should have known better than to tell a dedicated group of hackers that something is “impossible,” though, as two recent projects have made great progress toward functional Doom ports on stock Neo Geo hardware. Meanwhile, the Doom-NG project operates similarly to the sprite-strip raycaster that MVG discussed as a potential option in his original Neo Geo Doom video. While that raycaster only worked on simple, Wolfenstein 3D-style 90-degree-angled grids, Doom-NG’s VSlice renderer handles more complex geometry by stepping through a Doom map’s BSP tree to determine what walls and other objects are visible from the player’s perspective. The renderer then uses the Neo Geo hardware to efficiently scale sprites into 16-pixel-wide strips, simulating the wall’s size and position in that column of the screen.