DOOM on Neo Geo: "I was wrong" - the port once deemed impossible might actually happen

On July 12, 2026, developer and content creator Modern Vintage Gamer (MVG) posted an update on a challenge he himself had issued to the homebrew scene about a month earlier: porting DOOM to the Neo Geo. Unlike almost every other 16-bit console of its era, the Neo Geo has no frame buffer at all, with the entire display built from sprites, which seemingly made it impossible to render DOOM's angled walls, variable floor heights, or lifts.

Several developers took on the challenge anyway, using radically different approaches. Frenkels and Sabino adapted their own DOOM 64KB ports, relying on a genuine BSP tree and the game's original map geometry while repurposing the console's fixed text layer as a tiny makeshift frame buffer. Meanwhile, the developer behind Retro Port built an entirely new rendering engine called "Vslice," which leverages hardware scalers and a BSP tree without requiring per-pixel CPU work.

"I was wrong," MVG admitted after seeing these demos, while stressing that none of the projects are finished and that no release is planned anytime soon; in his view, finishing a playable DOOM port on Neo Geo is now purely a matter of time rather than technical impossibility.

The source code for these experiments remains publicly available, including Frenkels' DOOM 64KB port and Retro Port's Vslice engine, for anyone curious to follow these still-experimental projects.

Source: Time Extension