I have strived to craft a unique and cohesive set of compelling features, while continuing to uphold my respect for that classic, nostalgic DOOM experience many of us, after all this time, still hold dear.

DOOM Retro has been under relentless, meticulous development ever since its debut on December 10, 2013 commemorating DOOM's 20th anniversary, and now, after so many years, I still have absolutely no intention of stopping. Its source code was originally derived from Chocolate DOOM but is now very much its own beast. It does include all the usual, obligatory enhancements that you tend to find in those other source ports out there, but it also has so many of its own cool, original ideas that continues to set itself apart.

DOOM Retro is and always will be intentionally minimalist in its approach, and so it does a few things differently. It supports all vanilla, limit removing, BOOM, MBF and MBF21-compatible maps and mods. In order to freely implement certain features, and due to the nature of DOOM demos, DOOM Retro does not support their recording or playback. There is also no multiplayer.

Written in C and released as free, open source software under version 3 of the GNU General Public License, DOOM Retro's 120,000 or so lines of code are diligently maintained in this public Git repository and regularly compiled into both 32 and 64-bit Windows apps using Microsoft Visual Studio Community. Although next to no support is provided, DOOM Retro's source code may also be compiled to run under both Linux and macOS.

What's New

DOOM Retro v5.8.2 is now available to download as either a 32 or 64-bit Windows app. Here's a list of what's changed since the last version:

  • DOOM Retro is now built using v18.1.0 of Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2026.
  • Minor changes have been made to further improve the overall performance and stability of DOOM Retro.
  • Minor changes have been made to text that is output to the console.
  • When changing a CVAR in the console, a message is now displayed indicating that the CVAR has been changed and what it was previously.
  • The values of color CVARs in the console, shown either by entering a CVAR individually or by using the cvarlist CCMD, are now shown with a colored background.
  • A new palette CCMD has been implemented that will display a table of all 256 colors in the current palette.
  • The spawn CCMD now still tries to spawn things anywhere around the player if there isn't enough space directly in front of them.
  • Minor improvements have been made to the colors used for the DOOM Retro logo in the console when the edge color is bright.
  • These changes have been made to the support of DEHACKED lumps:
  • The trail of smoke behind rockets fired by the player and cyberdemons when the r_rockettrails CVAR is on now appear if thing 149 and/or its accompanying states are replaced.
  • A bug is fixed whereby the execution of certain codepointers could be repeated in the same tic in some rare instances.
  • Navigating to E1M0, E2M0 and MAP99 in Legacy Of Rust using the map CCMD or IDCLEV cheat has been fixed.
  • These improvements have been made to the support of DBIGFONT lumps:
  • Black pixels are no longer translucent.
  • ON/OFF and HIGH/LOW now appear in the options menu.
  • A bug is fixed whereby music wouldn't be played in some rare instances when extras.wad was autoloaded.
  • The screen now always clears to black at startup.
  • A bug is fixed whereby certain player's stats would become invalid when a monster is resurrected.
  • The default values of the crosshaircolor and am_crosshaircolor CVARs are now correct.
  • Improvements have been made to the position of the STTMINUS lump in the status bar and widescreen HUD when the player is dead and the negativehealth CVAR is on.
  • The map title and author in the automap are now always truncated correctly when the r_screensize CVAR is 8.