Kippykip

CEO of cancelled
cringge
You may say "GBA Doom II sucks dick! It's really censored as the blood is green! Hanging bodies on walls are missing and the colour palette is atrocious!".

WELL NOT TO WORRY!
This patch/mod replaces all Sprites, Palettes, Textures, Flats etc as closely as possible to the original classic DOS PC counterparts! Meaning everything is also uncensored in the process! This also gives textures way more detail far away due to the combination between a nearest neighbour filter and blinear, as the original rom only used blinear and made half the far away textures a solid colour.

Apparently the atrocious colour palette was made for the original GBA since it had no backlight at the time the game was made for it, but what I've made use of the Gamma setting palettes. The lower it is, the darker and closer it is to the PC DOS Doom palette. Lowest just simply being the PC palette. The higher it is, the more corrected the colours get for the GBA original screen colours (and also brighter).
I find the DS and the AGS-101 looks best on lowest Gamma, the GBA SP frontlit looks good around the middle, and the original non-lit looks best on the highest setting.

I have to give a massive shout-out to Marcus Lewis for painstakingly going through the levels and pointing our texture oddities either from this pack, or from the original release of the rom while I was developing and improving the Tools.
Thanks man, you've helped make GBA DOOM II GREAT AGAIN!

Anyhow, this patch also fixes some bugs left by Torus, some of the power-up animations are played back incorrectly, some areas will just randomly go really dark sometimes, and the super shotgun sound plays too fast!
These have all been fixed, well the super shotgun sound is still a bit too fast but it's as close as I can fix it.
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The weird dark area flicker glitch I was mentioning.

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^PC Conversion pack mod. Area always stays the same brightness like it should.

Have some more comparisons, ones on the right is this Conversion Pack mod:
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Rev 1.3.1
* After a couple years, I've returned to simply fix the pistol sprite to not have a chunky white square on the firing frame. It's been bugging me this whole time.
This was done via a manual hex edit, so in the "Pistol Sprite HEX fix\" directory, search the for the hex string contained in "search.bin" and replace it with the contents of "replacement.bin"
Rev 1.3
* Blood particles now fall down somewhat, to try an match the PC version.
This works by taking advantage of the new YSTART/YSTOP rearranging introduced in the
GBA Doom II Modding Tools 0.2 Beta version.
Rev 1.1
* Fixed a graphical glitch when walking far away from the Brick2 texture.
It was fixed via adding new *.LOC files so the texture would point to a new blank spot.
(On the original release it was borrowing off some red brick texture perhaps?)

Rev 1.0:
* Original release.
Alright, so you're wondering how do I use this patch/mod?
Well you got two methods, you can either use my GBA Doom II Modding Tools which is what I used to make this mod in the first place, or use an IPS patch.
If you haven't already, copy your Doom II rom to the Modding Tools root folder as DoomII.GBA and run Decompile.exe. Read Documentation.txt if you have to. Also remember decompiling/recompiling will take a while.

Afterwards to apply the patch, simply just copy the "Recompile" folder from this PC Conversion Pack ZIP (it's below in the attachments area of the thread), and merge it to the "Recompile" folder from your extracted GBA Doom II Modding Tools folder.
Then run Recompile.exe (preferable as "Recompile.exe Topmost") and you should get a DoomII_Recomp.gba!
And that's your patched rom!
Just download the DoomII-PC-Conv.ips file below in the attachments and use your favourite IPS patcher and patch the original rom.
My goto IPS tool is Lunar IPS, Just run it and click "Apply IPS Patch", browse for the downloaded DoomII-PC-Conv.ips, then select your original Doom II GBA Rom!

If you appreciate the few months of work put into this and the tools, you can always Donate and help me host this website. c;
 

Attachments

  • DoomII-PC-Conv-1.3.1.ips
    4.1 MB · Views: 1,818
  • GBA D2 PC Conversion Pack 1.3.1.zip
    8.7 MB · Views: 1,545
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Kippykip

CEO of cancelled
cringge
I think this is the best thing that has ever happened in a long time! :D
Ayy! Thanks!
I still have yet to do the sound update though as right now it only supports a little bit of sounds, I want to make a mod with PS1 Doom sounds/hud for the GBA when I get around to it!
 

Razor

New Lad
Member
Ayy! Thanks!
I still have yet to do the sound update though as right now it only supports a little bit of sounds, I want to make a mod with PS1 Doom sounds/hud for the GBA when I get around to it!

You're doing sounds too? This is gonna be so awesome! i can't wait. i told my friends about this awesome project. and they like it.
 

Kippykip

CEO of cancelled
cringge
You're doing sounds too? This is gonna be so awesome! i can't wait. i told my friends about this awesome project. and they like it.
Yeah eventually!
here's a basic example I did a while back, it has a custom shotgun sound and the icon of sin plays a different sound:
 

ShadowOne333

Posted once, ONCE
Member
Hey Kippy!

Signed in to say that the work you did for this hack is amazing!
It's really astounding how you managed to port the textures and some of the lightning effects to the GBA port of Doom 2 :)
The id games from the early 90's hold a special place in my life, and it fills me with joy to see this much love given to one of the least liked ports of Doom 2.

Have you considered doing a similar thing to Wolfenstein 3D for the GBA?
That port is greatly underrated, and if only it had proper music, I would go on and say that it'd be the best home console port of Wolfenstein 3D without a doubt.

I'll be keeping an eye for your upcoming work!
Thanks again for this! :D
 

John Enigma

Posted once, ONCE
Member
This hack feels like a lifesaver for this game. And just like the one above me said, it would be cool if you made a similar hack to:

  1. DOOM (GBA)
  2. Wolfenstein 3D (GBA) - However, I would love if the hack also included the missing quick save feature in some form, and the missing music.
  3. Duke Nukem Advance (GBA) - Since this is an original Duke Nukem game, it would be nice if it had graphics from the original Duke Nukem 3-D. Thus, making it kinda M-rated.
  4. DOOM (SNES) - Similar to your DOOM II PC Conversion mod, but for the Super NES version. I feel like this one also needs it the most, since it's one of the worst DOOM ports ever made.
 

Kippykip

CEO of cancelled
cringge
This hack feels like a lifesaver for this game. And just like the one above me said, it would be cool if you made a similar hack to:

  1. DOOM (GBA)
  2. Wolfenstein 3D (GBA) - However, I would love if the hack also included the missing quick save feature in some form, and the missing music.
  3. Duke Nukem Advance (GBA) - Since this is an original Duke Nukem game, it would be nice if it had graphics from the original Duke Nukem 3-D. Thus, making it kinda M-rated.
  4. DOOM (SNES) - Similar to your DOOM II PC Conversion mod, but for the Super NES version. I feel like this one also needs it the most, since it's one of the worst DOOM ports ever made.
Since Doom 1 for the GBA just used the PC Doom engine, graphics got uncensored pretty quickly since it just used a WAD file in the rom, although no gibbing or disappearing bodies as that would require the source code or editing cpu instructions.
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/474/

Well these patches including my own only fixes the pre-existing graphics/palettes and sound by modifying pointers and the raw graphic data.
But to add new features to the engines I would have to actually have to learn how the processor architecture works and somehow modify the instructions, or have access to the source code of the game. But we only have the source to the PC versions.
Although one day I want to try programming homebrew for the GBA, if I ever get into it I could try to re-port Doom to the GBA but no guarantees haha.

Oh also Duke Nukem uses the same engine as GBA Doom 2, so the modding tool extraction functions should be sorta compatible already. I would just have make new \bin offset files for everything.
 

Kippykip

CEO of cancelled
cringge
I have literally returned after two whole years just so I could fix this stupid white box that was on the pistol firing sprite.

Before:
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After:
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I CAN NOW DIE PEACEFULLY
 

patters

New Lad
Member
Which specific Doom II ROM version is the IPS patch intended for - the USA one or the EUR one?
If I apply to both they each still appear to function when tested in VisualBoyAdvance, the game doesn't crash in the first level so it's not obvious.
If I use the Doom II Modding Tools method (with or without the pistol hex patch) I end up with a file which doesn't match the checksum of either of the IPS patched ROMs. I'd prefer the simplicity of just using the IPS method, provided that I know which ROM it was produced for. Thanks
 

Kippykip

CEO of cancelled
cringge
Which specific Doom II ROM version is the IPS patch intended for - the USA one or the EUR one?
If I apply to both they each still appear to function when tested in VisualBoyAdvance, the game doesn't crash in the first level so it's not obvious.
If I use the Doom II Modding Tools method (with or without the pistol hex patch) I end up with a file which doesn't match the checksum of either of the IPS patched ROMs. I'd prefer the simplicity of just using the IPS method, provided that I know which ROM it was produced for. Thanks
I dumped my own cartridge when I made this patch, I'm Australian so I'm assuming it'll be the european rom.
As for the checksum after using the modding tools, I'm pretty sure I used the lower mode when recompiling sprites. Default is center so just check that.
 

patters

New Lad
Member
Thanks for the reply. I have tried using the tools on the European ROM, using "recompile Bottommost" but again I get a checksum which is different from the European ROM patched with the IPS file. If I apply the gun hex mod it still doesn't match. In the readme for the PC Conversion you suggest that we should use "recompile Topmost" or else the player sprite can end up with transparent pixels, so this is a bit confusing.

To settle this - any chance you could open up your modded ROM in a hex editor and confirm whether its four byte identifier at offset 0xAC is indeed A9DP (Europe) or A9DE (USA)? I noticed that there are some GBA ROMs where the US version was common to USA and Australia, so although it's usually the case, Australia doesn't always get the European release. Thanks!

EDIT - in fact the physical cart normally has this ID stamped on the label.
 
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