Cross Platform Online Multiplayer Added To Doom For Dreamcast

Not content with dragging large swathes of the Dreamcast's official library back online with Ooga Booga, POD 2, NFL 2K and Monaco Online (to name but a few), all-round programming genius Shuouma has turned his attention to an unofficial Dreamcast release and managed to bring it online for the first time. That game is DCDoom, an unofficial port of id's seminal first person shooter, and now Dreamcast owners can play cross platform with PC owners. Sounds pretty awesome, right?
Naturally, the pool of gamers still playing multiplayer Doom is quite small these days, and even smaller if you factor in the number of people who own a Dreamcast, a DreamPi and a copy of DCDoom...but still, the fact that this is an option is pretty interesting. Shuouma has confirmed that cross platform gaming works, stating:

"I looked at this and I have now added modem support for DCDoom. I have also tested to play
from my DC after dialup against my Linux machine running SDL Doom. Works fine. So the network-code is working. People just need to be careful when setting up the network variables."
- Shuouma

It's worth noting that you will need a specially modded version of DCDoom which Shuouma says will be released soon as a downloadable CDI file. We'll update this article when it's available and we've tested it out ourselves, but in the meantime you can find out more about this fascinating project by visiting the DC-Talk forum thread on the topic here. Thank's to Luiz Nai for the heads up on this.

Source: Dreamcast Talk

5 comments:

Hiro said...

Pity that Doom 3 did not come out in the Dreamcast.

Tom Charnock said...

It would have needed considerable visual downgrades - even the original Xbox struggled to run it well. Not sure I’d want to play a worse looking version, even if it was on DC!

hoogafanter said...

LMFAO Luiz you crazy man!

DreamcastUK said...

I normally play co op online Doom and Doom 2 on Xbox 360 (XBLA) which is really fun and set it to nightmare with enemies spawning.

So let’s hope there is co op online as well as deathmatch on the Dreamcast version too.

Could that mean ports like Blood / Half Life / CounterStrike / Wolfenstein 3D / Duke Nukem 3D / Marathon / Heretic to name just a few may also make an appearance? Who knows fingers crossed it’s more playable than currently the only FPS that appears on the Dreamcast online (Q3A)

Anthony817 said...

DCDoom is one of the better ports. It has full VMU support and rumble every time you shoot your weapon. I know it supposedly had broadband support, but nobody could ever successfully test it or get it to connect from what I have seen. Now this way more people will be able to play it online.

Really glad he goe online working with the modem! Lets hope more homebrew games can be given online functionality in the future! I would love to see a more updated modern port of the Marathon Trilogy, the source port Aleph One. It was the precursor to Halo and the previous port had no mouse or controller support or working saves which was a bummer playing with the keyboard.

I would love even more to see a working port of Duke Nukem 3D, can't believe nobody else attempted it after Bero's 2003 port. Was seriously not worth even trying it ran so glitchy.