1991 was the year I became an Atari ST owner - I was 7 years old, and my parents bought
it for me for Christmas. The STE Discovery Extra pack, no less, and I have an original
box framed on my wall as part of my little YouTube set here.
The year after I got that STE, in 1992, id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D was released,
the predecessor to the legendary Doom, of course. I distinctly remember playing it on
my dad’s work Amstrad PC that he used to bring home at the weekends, and those late
night gaming sessions instilled in me a love for first person shooters that continued throughout
the 90s and beyond.
But what childhood me perhaps didn’t dare dream is that a grown up PC game like Wolfenstein
3D would end up on my little Atari.
Fortunately, many years later, an insanely talented German ST demoscener by the name
of Reimund Dratwa did dare to dream that dream, and teamed up with a group going by the name
of The Sirius Cybernetics Corp - to finally make it a reality.
Unfortunately, for reasons I’ll go into later, their port never made it past the alpha
stage. But it’s still a glorious thing to behold - and behold it we certainly shall.
Right now.
So first things first, I just want to confirm that this is a stock Atari STE - my original
childhood one no less, although it does have 4MB of RAM these days. This game will actually
run with 2MB, and in the STE upgrading the RAM is just a case of dropping in a few 30
pin SIMMs, so they’ve pretty much all been upgraded by this point. It’s also running
the original Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 8MHz.
This port also runs on a standard ST, and I’ll have a look at that a bit later on,
but for now we’ll stick with the STE.
So I have it installed on my UltraSatan here which is a modern SD based hard drive emulator,
and firing it up is just a case of launching the files from TOS like anything else.
I have to say I was impressed with the music. Unfortunately it doesn’t play during the
game itself like the PC version - I think that would be a pretty big ask from the humble
ST - but the YM conversions by chiptune artist Mathieu Stempell AKA DMA-Sc definitely capture
the spirit of the originals.
So as you can see here, we have all of the chapters available. By the developer’s own
admission they’re not all working - I found that chapters 1 and 5 crashed out immediately,
and in fact I didn’t manage to complete any of them without some kind of error, but
it’s certainly not something I’d hold against alpha software like this.
The graphics in the menus and the game itself were all redrawn for a 16 colour palette by
the legendary Apple IIgs demo group Ninjaforce, who also supplied the sound effects from their
own Wolfenstein 3D IIgs port.
As you can probably hear, the sample playback for the sound effects isn’t great - the
sounds seem to be clipping - but hopefully this is just a bug that could be relatively
easy to address.
Although still in its early stages, the Atari ST version of Wolf3D does have a few nifty
features similar to the PC version, including the ability to resize the screen and switch
between low and high detail modes on the fly to try to find the best balance between quality
and performance.
The game’s engine uses a nifty palette switching technique between the gameplay and the HUD,
so it can technically show up to 32 colours on screen, even on a standard ST.
Speaking of a standard ST, I just had to try this out, and to be honest the only real notable
difference is the sound. Without the STE’s more capable DMA chip, it’s even more broken
than the STE in places, although I’m impressed they got it working at all, and as I said
previously, it’s all a work in progress.
Personally I find the low detail mode just about playable on this STE, and knocking the
screen size down a notch improves things even further, I guess growing up in the early PC
era means that things like low frame rates don’t really bother me too much. The developers
claim speeds of up to 15FPS with the right combination of settings and I have no reason
to doubt that.
I don’t have a 16MHz MegaSTE to hand, but I did try it out in the Hatari emulator and
it certainly does run better, even in high detail mode.
So what became of this port? Well, Reimund was called away to military service and just
ended up moving on to other things.
It’s a real shame that the source code and assets weren’t open sourced so development
could continue, but with so many different people involved I imagine it would’ve been
a bit of a minefield. I’m just glad that it exists at all, to be honest.
If you’d like to learn a bit more about Reimund and DMA-Sc’s work on this project,
there are some excellent interviews with them over on atarilegend.com, and I’ll of course
link to those down below in the description.
So I hope you enjoyed checking out this interesting moment in gaming history with me and pondering
what could’ve been, and until next time, thank you very much for joining me and I’ll
hopefully see you again soon.