Last month, we passed along Modern Vintage Gamer's (MVG) confident assertion that Doom is functionally impossible to run on the Neo Geo, owing to the console's sprite-based display hardware and lack of a frame buffer. We all should have known better than to tell a dedicated group of hackers that something is "impossible," though, as two recent projects have made great progress toward functional Doom ports on stock Neo Geo hardware.

Both of these projects have significant graphical compromises that limit how viable they would have been for a marketable, '90s-era console port, as MVG lays out in a new video. Still, they stand as a testament to the surprising results that clever, determined coders can coax out of legacy hardware.

It looks like Doom if you squint

To create the Doom64KB project for the Neo Geo, coder FrenkelS adapted an earlier Doom port they designed to run on 16-bit PC processors like the 8088 and 286. Using that engine, the Neo Geo code then makes a kind of proto frame buffer out of the console's fix layer, an area of display memory that's usually used to display menus and HUD information on top of gameplay.

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In announcing plans for 3,200 layoffs across the Xbox division yesterday, CEO Asha Sharma focused on discussing cuts to the Xbox platform team and redundant layers of middle management. Now, though, word is filtering out about significant staffing cuts at remaining Microsoft-owned game developers including id Software and Bethesda.

Apogee and 3D Realms founder Scott Miller—who helped publish some of id's earliest games—wrote on social media yesterday of "insider reports" that a majority of id had been laid off, "including most (if not all) coders." And last night, veteran programmer Michael Maynard—whose credits at id Software date back to 2011's Rage—wrote on LinkedIn that he was among the "roughly 50%" of the id team that was let go Monday.

Game Developer cites "multiple anonymous sources" in confirming those reports, saying the redundancies amount to about 90 employees at the Doom studio. The first DLC pack for last year's Doom: The Dark Ages launched earlier today.

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