DreadMD

Just a quick, completely vibe coded (everything was done by Claude Opus 5 while I was taking a nap. The only thing I did was remap controls) port of Dread to the Sega Genesis.

I'm not normally much of a 3D guy but the author of MegalDoom (which is also heavily reliant on LLMs, to the point even the E1M1 map conversion appears to be done with AI) challenged me to "do better" and I knew even a low-effort attempt of porting Dread would be an improvement.

This is by no means a dig at the author of MegalDoom but more of a lighthearted criticism of overly relying on LLMs while, ironically, I was using an LLM to prove that very point.

The original weapon cycling was the exact same horrible design used by MegalDoom (naturally. Both use Claude) that Claude itself so succinctly summarized with

The fix: 
weapon cycling moved to C + up/down.
That leaves the full scheme as just A / B / C / Start / D-pad

while then also simultaneously failing at that, leaving a broken state where I had to tap once to change to the second weapons slot and three times to change back to the first one (at a time when I was only in possession of two firearms).

The natural, human instinct is of course "Tap button to cycle through" (on a three-button controller, that is).

Controls:

A - Shoot
B - Open doors
C - Cycle through weapons
Hold C + Left/Right - Strafe

Game was only tested in BlastEm. If enough people like it, I could see myself working on porting Doom maps to it, optimizing things a bit more, adding an OST and documenting the whole process on my Patreon and Ko-Fi

Credit belongs to the original creator of the Dread engine, who is currently working on the renamed reboot GRIND . Without his excellent code, this little side-project wouldn't have been possible.

Please use LLMs responsibly and refrain from brute forcing things without understanding the underlying architecture. Without the original code as a perfect guideline and with a game less tailored to relatively weak hardware, this would've turned out very differently. A verbatim Doom port that uses the CPU as a rasterizer and doesn't pre-compute walls is simply impractical. Any successful FPS port on a 68000 will require a PVS (Potentially Visible Set) system. List walking is infinitely cheaper than per-frame traversal (yes, these lines were written by me, not any LLM. I'm just a nerd).

Image of Sega Mega Drive console for cover art liberally borrowed from senkogames.com (fair use). The original Dread floppy image can be found here