ZX Spectrum DOOM!

2011-05-26 • Thadeuss • (Blogs - Thadeuss)

Well, I'm loaded with the cold and off of work today, guess there's nothing else for it but to post the Spectrum version of DOOM. That's right, DOOM running on a 128k ZX Spectrum! If you don't know what the Spectrum (fondly called 'speccy') is then I'll let you in on the best kept secret this side of the Atlantic. The ZX spectrum was a British 8-bit computer that was hugely popular throughout the 1980s. It was a contemporary of the Commodore 64, the biggest selling computer of all time. Sadly the good ole speccy was vastly inferior in terms of specifications to the C64 and as such didn't do too well outside of Europe and Russia. The one thing it did have, however, was accessibility for programmers. Many of the world's leading game designers cut their teeth on spectrum games and to this day it is my favourite format of all time due to the imagination of these programmers getting the most out of this diminutive machine. I digress, here is a port of DOOM running on the speccy. It doesn't have the level design, but it does have the sprites with a typically awesome 8-bit soundtrack. It's incredible that someone got this running on a machine that's nearly 30 years old! All we need now is for some bright spark in the ZD mapping community to make a WAD based on this....I'm looking at you Cybershark...