Crazy SEGA Nerds: Fan ports Doom to the SEGA Genesis

Possibly the biggest game of the 90s and the once king of shooters, Doom, is now playable on the SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive. Well, actually that’s an over-simplification. The game is playable on original Genesis/Mega Drive hardware, but you’ll need an (expensive) EverDrive Pro to run it.

Developer, uniq.games, has created “Mega Doom” – a port of the original Doom based on the Linux engine of the game. The above video is from uniq.games and is said to be running the free shareware version of the game. And it looks great for a 16-bit version of the game!

This is awesome news for Doom fans. Despite being one of the hottest games around during SEGA’s dominance in the 90s, Doom saw a rocky relationship with SEGA’s systems. Sadly the Genesis wasn’t powerful enough to run the game on its own, whereas Nintendo’s SNES saw a port. So developers, iD Software, decided to use the extra power of the 32X add-on to bring the game to SEGA fans.

Sadly, the 32X version wasn’t great. Due to tight deadlines, the game was somewhat rushed, meaning that background music was removed and entire levels were skipped. Doom later had another opportunity to come to a SEGA console, on the Saturn… which had terrible frame-rates and ended up being one of the worst versions of the game around.

Anyway, back to Mega Doom! The game is said to run on the FPGA (field-programmable gate array) inside the Mega EverDrive Pro flash cartridge, meaning (from what I’m told) it won’t run on the native hardware alone or on emulators.

So if you own a Mega EverDrive Pro and want to give this port a try, check out uniq.games’ Twitter post, which has links to the files, including the shareware version of Doom.