Hackers are already porting Doom to the Neo Geo after being told it was impossible

After Modern Vintage Gamer declared Doom functionally impossible to run on the Neo Geo last month, two separate hacking projects have stepped up to prove that claim wrong — or at least seriously complicated. Neither port is a clean, marketable release, but both get Doom running on stock Neo Geo hardware, which is more than anyone expected.

The first project, Doom64KB, comes from coder FrenkelS, who adapted an earlier Doom engine originally built to run on 16-bit PC processors — the 8088 and 286. That engine gets transplanted onto the Neo Geo, where FrenkelS repurposes the console's fix layer as a makeshift proto frame buffer. The fix layer is normally reserved for menus and HUD overlays drawn on top of gameplay, not for rendering a full 3D scene — but with enough creative abuse, it becomes the backbone of a working Doom renderer. The results are visually rough, and MVG breaks down the graphical compromises in a new video, but the core of Doom is unmistakably there.

The Neo Geo's hardware is genuinely hostile to this kind of port. The console was built around sprite-based display hardware with no traditional frame buffer — exactly the architecture MVG cited as the reason Doom couldn't work. Doom's software renderer assumes it can write pixels freely to a flat memory buffer and then push that to the screen, a workflow the Neo Geo simply wasn't designed to support. Getting around that constraint requires rethinking the renderer from the ground up rather than doing a straightforward port.

MVG has covered the new projects in a follow-up video, giving credit where it's due while also being clear about the limitations. These aren't ports you'd have shipped in 1994, but they're a sharp reminder that "impossible" is a word that tends to attract exactly the wrong kind of attention from the right kind of programmers.