Mankind’s most noble quest, to get Doom running on every piece of hardware imaginable, continues apace, and now one enthusiast vintage blogger has documented the process of getting the game to run on Apple’s $10,000 Network Server from 1996. Old VCR’s Cameron Kaiser confirmed they didn’t cheat either, with no Linux, NetBSD, or NCommander AIX Doom backport in sight.
Kaiser says the fact that NCommander’s AIX Doom, which requires AIX (Advanced Interactive Executive) 4.3, won’t run on the Apple Network Server, is what prompted the mission to get Doom up and running on the ANS by some other means in the first place.
The ANS was built and sold by Apple between February 1996 and April 1997. As noted, they ran IBM’s AIX OS, with a ROM that couldn’t even boot Apple’s own macOS software. Three total models, priced between $11,000 and $19,000, were sold. Kaiser has confirmed elsewhere that their particular ANS is the 500/132 model, which features a base specification of a maximum 64MB of RAM, 1MB of built-in DRAM for video, and a 2GB hard drive.
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Kaiser used Doom Generic as the foundation for the stunt, noting its minimal hardware assumptions and Xlib support, and installed the AIXPDSLIB 2.91.66 compiler as the toolchain. Kaiser started with a Makefile, used to create a base of Doom that could be run over remote X.
After plenty of coding wizardry, Kaiser’s Doom project was playable via Apple’s Remote Desktop at a reasonable speed on a Mac, but completely unusable on the console itself, mostly due to a quirk with ANS video, which maxes out at 1024 x 768 and can’t do more than 8-bit color depth. A quick rebuild of the executable to run Doom Generic with an 8-bit colormap, which gives the build proper pixels but dreadful colors.
One Kaiser had fixed the colors, the ANS displayed a functioning Doom, the console reportedly running without lag and with decent general movement, apart from strafing. Kaiser assigned the Command keys for this purpose, and voila! Doom is fully functioning on an Apple Network Server.
Kaiser swapped out the ANS’ clunky CRT monitor for an LCD display to show off the gameplay, and also applied the same build to an IBM RS/6000 Notebook 860, noting that their creation will work on any AIX 4.1 system. If you’re interested in following in Kaiser’s footsteps, both precompiled builds are now available on Github.
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