Here at Ars, we've taken pleasure in reporting on versions of Doom running on everything from wireless earbuds to Windows' notepad.exe. So when we hear that a Neo Geo can't run Doom, our ears perk up.

The Neo Geo is an early '90s game console with a powerful Motorola 68000 CPU, the same as in the Commodore Amiga, which saw many homebrew Doom ports over the years. Yet, despite its relative power, it was designed specifically for sprite-based 2D graphics stored on cartridges.

The console's architecture makes it particularly ill-suited for a port of id’s famously easy-to-port game. The CPU writes tile numbers and positions into VRAM, which is then fetched by the video processor from the character ROM for display. This system lacks unrestricted drawing capabilities, meaning even an entirely software-based Doom renderer would struggle to draw its results directly to the screen.

The Neo Geo's design prioritizes sprite-based graphics over bitmap modes, which limits its flexibility in handling detailed textures or pixel-level post-processing. This makes it fundamentally challenging to adapt a game like Doom, known for its complex rendering requirements and flexible display options, onto this hardware.