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4 months ago
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This is a minimal, platform-agnostic Go port of the legendary DOOM engine, transpiled from the doomgeneric codebase. No CGo. No platform dependencies. Just pure, unadulterated demon-slaying action powered by the glory of Go's cross-compilation.
The original C code was converted to Go using (modernc.org/ccgo/v4), by cznic (https://gitlab.com/cznic/doomgeneric.git). This was then manually cleaned up to remove a lot of manual pointer manipulation, and make things more Go-ish, whilst still maintaining compatibility with the original Doom, and its overall structure.
- ✅ Platform Agnostic: Runs anywhere Go runs
- ✅ Minimal Dependencies: Only requires Go standard library
- ✅ Multiple DOOM Versions: Supports DOOM, DOOM II, Ultimate DOOM, Final DOOM
- ✅ WAD File Support: Bring your own demons via WAD files
- ✅ Memory Safe: Go's GC protects you from buffer overflows (but not from Cacodemons) (WIP - 95% complete)
- ✅ Cross Compilation: Build for any target from any platform
- One instance per process: Still has a lot of the original global variables, which prevent multiple instances from running
- Random exported consts: The original C code used the standard convention of all upper case for const/enum values. This results in the Go code assuming these are exported values, when really they're internal state info
- Nice external API for state inspection: It would be good to be able to change the running state externally, without exposing everything in such a raw way
- unsafe: There are still some instances of unsafe in the code. It would be good to get rid of these to have better bounds access guarantees
- Go 1.24+
- A WAD file
These examples are both very minimal, and whilst technically run the game, they are not really fully complete games in their own right (ie: Missing key bindings etc...). They all assume that a Doom wad is available in the current directory. The shareware Doom wad is available at https://www.doomworld.com/classicdoom/info/shareware.php, or bring your own from a commercial copy.
This example renders the Doom output using ANSI color codes suitable for a 256-bit color capable terminal. It has very limited input support, as terminals typically do not support key-up events, or control-key support. So fire has been remapped to ,, and it is necessary to repeatedly tap keys to get them to continue, as opposed to press & hold.
Now browse to http://localhost:8080 to play
The window should pop up to run Doom
You need the game data files (WAD) to run DOOM:
- Shareware: Download doom1.wad (free)
- Retail: Use your legally owned copy of DOOM.WAD or doom2.wad
- Ultimate DOOM: doom.wad from Ultimate DOOM
- Final DOOM: tnt.wad or plutonia.wad
Similar to doomgeneric, the actual input/output is provided externally. The following interface is required:
| DrawFrame() | Render the frame to your display |
| SetTitle() | Set the window title as appropriate to the given WAD |
| GetEvent() | Report key presses/mouse movements |
DOOM source code is released under the GNU General Public License.
This Go port maintains the same licensing terms.
