Doom CD32X Fusion is a brand-new homebrew version of Doom for the Sega 32X CD. It’s really amazing with fantastic performance, and makes use of all five CPUs in the Genesis with Sega CD and 32X in order to get the best performance and graphical output possible on the hardware. DJ, you’ve probably heard of it but have you tried it yet?
Features: 100 levels, 96 FM music tracks, a fully redone from scratch port that takes nothing from original 32X Doom, a game which makes full use of a complete Genesis with Sega CD and 32X setup.
In order to run the game, you either need to use the Ares emulator or have real hardware. For emulation, Ares is required because other emulators don’t support cart+cd combo releases like this, only a CD-only or cart-only game. For real hardware, you must have a Genesis with a Sega CD and a 32X, a flash cart like an Everdrive, and a computer with a CD burner and a blank CD. Fortunately I have all of these things. I’ve never actually used my Genesis Everdrive Pro before this, for whatever reason I’d bought the thing a year or two ago but never used it, but now I have.
Yes, it requires both a flashcart and a real Sega CD drive with disc, since the game is a cart game with additional data on the CD so it requires both. The release is entirely legal because it doesn’t come with the Doom or Doom 2 game files; instead, Doom CD32X Fusion is a pair of rom patches and a cuefile. You use a rom patcher to apply the two patches to your Doom and Doom 2 WADs, then prepare and burn the CD with the cue file. Then load up the game rom on the Everdrive while the disc is in the SCD’s drive and the game will load. The game could have its own cartridge and CD, of course, instead of needing an Everdrive or similar and a disc you burn yourself, but I don’t know if this will ever have an official release, I doubt it.
As for why the game requires a working real Sega CD and can’t run through the Everdrive Pro like the cartridge does, that’s a somewhat complex question. Part of this is because the cartridge port is using the cartridge with the main base game data, and I’m not sure if it would be possible to emulate both CD and cart at the same time… but this doesn’t matter, because while the Everdrive can emulate a Sega CD (but not a 32X), you can’t run CD images on an Everdrive with a 32X attached to your console. This is because the 32X locks out some Sega CD access from its cartridge port. The only way around this limitation would be a hardware device which plugs into the Genesis accessory port, and so far no such device exists. And so, as an aside, with an Everdrive Pro basically you have a choice: have your 32X attached to your full ‘tower of power’ setup and be able to play 32X game files, or remove the 32X and be able to play Sega CD images, play Sega Master System game roms, and to use the in-game menu to do things like quicksave. SMS games are disabled because the 32X disables SMS support, but I don’t know why that last one is that way… but yes, for some reason the ingame menu is disabled with the 32X attached. So yeah you lose a lot with the 32X and an Everdrive, but I love the 32X so I don’t know if I’d ever remove it.
And plus, with the 32X you can play this amazing homebrew release, Doom CD32X Fusion! Again this is basically a cartridge game which uses the CD for additional data, so the core Doom 1 files are mostly on the ‘cartridge’, while the Doom 2 files, the other levels on this collection, a lot of FM music tracks, and anything else you add — CD audio music tracks if you want them, additional levels, and such — go onto the CD. For the record this game has a 4MB (32 Megabit) cartridge and a 17MB CD. Could this have been done with a large bank-switched cartridge, instead of cart+CD? Maybe, I’m not sure, but either way on that but this way it’s more like a real Genesis game — the largest Genesis game ever was like 5MB, so a 20MB bank-switched game or something would not be realistic for a real Genesis game, but this setup certainly could have happened. By default there is no CD audio on the disc, but there is a CD audio option for if you add any wave files to the disc (and add in the files into the cuetable, of course). The 3DO Doom soundtrack would probably be an ideal addition. The FM music is good and there is a lot of it — over 90 tracks I believe they said — but not every track is equally good. When comparing this music to SNES Doom music some is better on each platform.
I need to make it clear though, yes, because there is a CD there are load times. All loading is in between levels though, not during stages, and the loads aren’t very long, five or ten seconds or so probably. The way it works is that the cart has the core Doom textures on it. Any level using anything beyond original Doom’s textures puts them into the 32X’s RAM from the CD during the pre-level load. This is ideal because you don’t want to be having to load data from the CD during play, Doom would not be a good fit for live-streaming data I would think, a pre-load into RAM is the better choice. Obviously this uses up 32X RAM so the number of added textures is probably limited, I don’t know the details. Level sizes are also more limited than PC Doom due to memory limitations or somesuch. This doesn’t affect Doom 1, but does affect the other games.
Still, this release is pretty amazing stuff for multiple reasons, and one is the performance. You have some nice graphical options here, including whether to have full textures on the ground and ceiling or to remove them and what resolution to use. The game also has an on-screen framerate display. The framerate maxes out at 30fps, you can’t go over 30. Sure. At the default ‘one step below full screen so there is a decent-sized border but it’s totally playable and is similar to the original SNES or 32X versions of Doom’ screen size the game runs quite well, over 20fps almost all of the time and often close to 30. Turn it up to full screen with full textures though and it’ll often be like 15fps, less in areas full of enemies. Turning off the ground textures bumps it over 20fps though. Comparing this to ’90s console versions of Doom… seriously, this significantly outclasses most of the “more powerful” consoles! This really shows how much power the Sega Genesis’s two processors, plus the Sega CD’s processor, plus the two in the 32X, can do when all used together by modern programmers.
As for in-game features, you start out by choosing to either run Doom (original PC Doom), Doom 2 (straight from the PC!), Resurrection (this is based on Doom 32X Resurrection, which was an enhanced version of original 32X Doom, so it has the cut-down Jaguar level maps and such), run (Mini-)TNT, or go to a file browser to run something else if you put more levels on the disc. TNT is a selection of 5 levels from the TNT Evillution part of Final Doom. A full conversion of Final Doom was abandoned because a lot of its levels are too large to fit into this games’ limited memory size, or something like that, so converting the levels to 32XCD took a huge amount of work. That any of Final Doom at all is here is really cool, though.
Once you choose a game, you can start a new game in either single or multi player. The game supports both two player split-screen and two player link play. I’m not sure how the link cable play works, you’d need quite the setup to try it, but it exists. It’s probably designed to use the Zero Tolerance controller 2 to controller 2 male to male controller cord? I’m not sure.
As for the controls, obviously since this is the Genesis it can’t use L and R for strafing as you could on SNES. Instead, you hold C to strafe. It works but you can’t circle-strafe, oh well. I don’t care. The other two buttons are fire and use. With a 6-button pad Z opens the map and X and Y switch weapons, or you can hold Mode and press a button for instant access to each weapon. The game also has Mega Mouse support, but I don’t have one so I don’t know how well that works. (I really should have the light gun and mouse for the Genesis, but for some reason I don’t…)
You also can “save”, with two save slots, and load your save game. The two slots are universal and it doesn’t tell you which game each file is from, only the level name. That’s a little annoying, but oh well. Also, you can’t save anywhere. Instead this game only saves from the beginning of the level, much like a classic console game. Ah well.
In terms of enemies, everything is here other than the Arch-Vile, Pain Elemental, and SS Soldier. I have heard of the Arch-Vile but don’t know what it is offhand, and don’t know what those other two are I presume they’re from Doom II? Never played it. It does have reverse sides of enemies, unlike the original SNES or 32X versions of Doom, and does have the invisible demon.
Visually, this is extremely accurate to the PC game, except for areas where levels had to be reduced in detail in order to fit in memory. Some things did need to be changed, particularly in the few levels of Final Doom that are here but also some in Doom 2, but it’s as accurate as possible. It has all of the little added graphical details of PC Doom that were missing from the ’90s console releases.
To mention a few other issues with this game, the map is the same as on the PC, so you don’t have the cool Mode 7 map of SNES Doom. It’d be a neat option but I understand sticking to the base design.
Also, while Doom’s levels are here, some of the rest of Doom’s presentation is not here. That is, the map screen between levels doesn’t exist here. There is still some in-between-level text, though, but not really the original episodes given that the map is gone and levels are numbered 1 to 27, not within each episode. You pretty much just play the 27 levels of Doom one after another. That’s pretty disappointing! The original 32X version of Doom was like this as well, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s worse than the PC (or SNES) versions. I hope that the map screens can be added back in at some point, I at least miss them.
Overall, I haven’t played this a lot but I have played it and it’s quite impressive. I’ve never played Doom II before, actually, despite owning it for PC. Maybe I’ll play it now. With a lot of levels and fantastic performance considering — with only minor sacrifices this game runs at a pretty stable 30fps — Doom CD32X Fusion is just amazing stuff! This is the first and only game to make full use of the whole Genesis setup, with a cartridge 32X game with a CD for additional data, and making use of all the processors for the best performance possible. Yes, this release has a few limitations, with its limited level size keeping them from converting most of Final Doom, FM music that is pretty good but sometimes doesn’t match SNES Doom’s greatness, no map between levels in Doom 1 — seriously, this is so unfortunate — and no circle-strafing, but still this game looks incredible and plays fantastic. It’s amazingly PC-accurate with only minor cuts. This is probably the best way to play Doom on a classic console, only the Playstation version compares and it’s stuck with the cut-down Jaguar level maps in Doom 1.
Find the game here:
https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/148783-doom-cd32x-fusion/
