Why Doom is impossible on Neo Geo hardware

🔑 Enhanced Key Takeaways

• •The Neo Geo's sprite-based graphics system utilized 16x16 pixel tiles, which could be combined into vertical strips up to 16x512 pixels and horizontally 'stuck together' to form larger objects, but lacked the ability for dynamic scaling upwards or rotation, only allowing sprites to be shrunk.
• •Unlike pure raycasting engines such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom's engine employed a more advanced pseudo-3D technique using Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) for walls and a scanline renderer for floors and ceilings, a method fundamentally incompatible with the Neo Geo's sprite-centric rendering approach.
• •A critical limitation of the Neo Geo for 3D rendering was its absence of a bitmap graphics mode, which is essential for games like Doom that rely on direct pixel manipulation to construct 3D environments rather than assembling pre-defined 2D sprites.
• •Despite its reputation for powerful 2D graphics, largely due to massive cartridge ROM capacities for storing extensive sprite animations, the Neo Geo's Motorola 68000 CPU (12 MHz) and lack of Direct Memory Access (DMA) were insufficient for the intensive 32-bit calculations required by Doom's engine.
• •Any attempt to simulate 3D environments on the Neo Geo would necessitate storing vast amounts of pre-scaled and potentially pre-rotated sprite graphics in ROM, which would consume immense cartridge space and still be constrained by the hardware's inability to dynamically manipulate sprites beyond simple shrinking.

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