The NES (and SNES) Classic is an amazing little console produced by Nintendo; it’s only flaw is the ridiculous false scarcity Nintendo created by only producing very limited numbers of them and thus causing scalpers to profit where Nintendo could have been enjoying sales. That said, if you manage to get one of either of these cool little retro consoles, you can do a lot more than just play the included games… with the help of a program called Hakchi2-CE, you can modify your console to enable adding not just more NES or SNES games, but Gameboy, Sega, arcade, NeoGeo and even Playstation and DOS games too!
How to do this is far beyond the scope of this blog; I suggest you start here or look for tutorials on YouTube (such as here).
Once you’ve got your console modded, though, one of the cool things you can do is run Doom and Doom 2 on it, with the help of an emulator called RetroArch. Again, instructions for setting up RetroArch can be found above. You’ll also need the prBoom (a Doom engine) “core” found in this package here.
Okay, now to the *actual* reason for this post:
Even though you can play Doom and Doom 2 on your Classic Mini, you still need to own a copy of the original games to obtain the needed files to copy across. It’s illegal to include these with any Doom “port” as the games are still copyrighted. While the Doom engine’s source code was made freeware, the original game’s assets (sprites, levels, music) are *not*, so even with source ports you still need to buy the game and copy over the original WADs.
However, there exists something called “FreeDoom“. FreeDoom is a totally free alternative to Doom 1 & 2, created by a team of volunteers. FreeDoom’s license allows (among other things) people to distribute a fully playable Doom engine game for free… as I’ve done here!
The music tracks included, I created myself, converting the default “midi” format music of FreeDoom to mp3 standard so it plays on the (S)NES Classic via prBoom. For these music conversions, I used Patch93’s Roland SC-55 Soundfont (v2.2) which can be found here if you’re curious (it’s awesome!). Short of owning a real Roland SC-55 sound card, this is the closest I could get to simulating how this kind of music was *meant* to sound “back in the day”.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE:
1) Make sure you have installed RetroArch and the prBoom core on your NES or SNES Classic (there are plenty of guides online to do this).
2) Copy this entire folder (CLV-Z-FREEDOOM1 and/or CLV-Z-FREEDOOM2) into your “games_snes” (for the SNESC) *or* “games” (for the NESC) subfolder inside your Hakchi2 directory.
3) Run Hakchi2 and check the checkbox next to the “FreeDoom: Phase 1” and/or “FreeDoom: Phase 2” (you should find it under “bin\prboom”).
4) Sync or export (the latter if using a USB storage device) to copy any checked games to your Classic (or USB device, if exporting).
5) Boot up your (S)NESC and play FreeDoom!
Let me know if there are any glitches or errors and I’ll fix them ASAP!
You can remap the controls using prBoom’s own “settings” menu option, and you can improve the graphics by pressing Select+Start and changing the resolution under Options.
Important Note: I will NOT be responding to questions on how to mod your (S)NES Classic to add/run other games! Go here or here for that sort of thing. This post assumes you have already modded your console and know what you are doing; I won’t take any responsibility if you mess anything up, either. It’s pretty much impossible to harm your console with these modifications, but I don’t have time to help people fix theirs if they make a mistake.
Download Links:
FreeDoom: Phase 1 (for prBoom on the Nintendo Classics)
FreeDoom: Phase 2 (for prBoom on the Nintendo Classics)
Banjo's Mods & Retro Gaming 