> Carmack wrote Quake on a NeXT and shipped on Windows, so if he was doing it back in the day, how wrong can it be?
This claim has mutated so grossly over the years it's comical. I clearly recall reading back in the day, probably in Dr. Dobbs Journal or Game Developer Magazine, that the NeXT Cube was largely used just for tools like the level editor, and they were generally seeking uses for the novel machine.
It was not the primary development environment. They only had one of these expensive machines after all, and the photos I saw from the era were of designer Tom Hall using it [1].
Do you really think John Carmack and Tom were sharing a computer while they hurried to create Doom?
From the caption for the NeXT Cube photo in the linked gallery showing Tom Hall, it's clearly his machine:
This picture was taken during DOOM development in 1993.
Tom's busy working on a map in my map editor, DoomEd,
but don't worry - you won't be able to make out anything on
the screen! Tom started many of the original DOOM maps and
after he left, Sandy Petersen finished them -- some of the
maps had very little work done to them, in fact.
On Tom's monitor is a little printout that says, "Quality".
He always has notes stuck to his monitor to keep him
reminded of .... things. That orange thing could very well
be the very first keyboard wrist pad -- made by a friend of
his back before you saw them in stores. The speaker at the
far right is one of the first Altec Lansing clamshell
models. The microphone in front of Tom was there for
NeXTSTEP's awesome email feature - built-in voice emails! We
always sent them back and forth... I think I might have some
of them lying around here...
[1]
https://romero.smugmug.com/Video-Games/The-Archives/i-T8gzwx...Edit:
It's possible they all moved onto NeXT machines after the success of Doom, but I am not aware of it. The NeXT tooling was not mature at the time and targeting x86 Windows/Dos from NeXT would have been a real nuisance. That's why it made sense for tools, since they could develop and run them on the NeXT machine.
Actually, I stand corrected, if Romero's account here is honest they appear to have done it all on NeXT. This is entirely inconsistent with what I read at the time:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070305165006/http://rome.ro/20...