New British site GBA Zone scored a sweet interview with David A. Palmer Productions, developer of the upcoming Doom port to GBA. Here are a few excerpts:

GBAZone - Has it been easy to port the game to the GBA?

DP - No, we had our own AGB slither render engine that Mat (Lead Programmer) programmed to do the job (lightning fast 3d), but we found that incorporating the WAD files (Doom's proprietary file format that contains all the level info) was very difficult indeed. Id Software helped us a lot but we would have had to re write much of the WAD to integrate all this to our code. That would have been a very long job. Id then gave us the Jaguar source code (essential info for programming) and Mat said he could convert this - and even more importantly with some major mods for ARM (AGB processor) make it very quick as well. Remember that the Jagaur was a 64 bit multi processor machine with 2Mbyte of RAM. AGB is a very different machine by comparison? Quite a squeeze to get it in. Mat said that getting the screen size down to 240x160 was also a major pain.

GBAZone - How many control methods are there?

DP - This was a tricky one with AGB. There had never been a game quite like this on a handheld and we took into account everyone's opinion for ergonomics (feel of controls). Activision's test department had by this time a lot of experience of AGB games and were very helpful (remember these guys tested the likes of Tony Hawk - a superb achievement on

AGB), as were id Software with their input. We ended up with a selection of the most popular control configs available. We hope everyone likes them?

GBAZone - Do you have any other GBA projects planned?

DP - Yes we do. We are working on a major title right now for release in May next year and we are looking at "others" as well - these are 3d of course :-)))))

Click the link above for the full interview, with even more techno babble and other giblets of info on Doom GBA.