RZDoom

About

Doom is a 1993 first-person shooter by id Software for MS-DOS, in which a space marine fights through hordes of undead humans and demons across the moons of Mars and into hell, using early 3D graphics with 2D sprite enemies and objects. RZDoom is a modernized fork of the ZDoom source port, fully compatible with existing ZDoom wads and mods, rewritten for cross-platform builds on Windows, Linux, macOS, and BSD across x86, x64, and ARM. It removes old 32-bit-only and assembly code in favor of modern equivalents and remains a purely software-rendered engine, preserving compatibility with wads that rely on older rendering behavior like HOM effects.

How it differs from the original

Compared to ZDoom, RZDoom targets more platforms and CPU architectures, switches from OpenAL to FMOD Studio for audio, adds UMAPINFO support, and is supported by the Brutal Doom Community Expansion team, while remaining fully backward compatible with existing ZDoom content.

Getting started

On Windows it's built using the provided project file; on other platforms it's built with CMake after downloading the FMOD Studio API (registration required), or players can wait for a prebuilt release. Playing it requires the player's own original Doom WAD files.

Status & roadmap

• As of an April 2025 readme update, development is moving toward an SDL3 graphical backend across all platforms, prioritizing POSIX systems before Windows.