Woof! A continuation of the Boom/MBF source port lineage for Doom.

Key features

• Continuation of the Boom and MBF lineage, maintaining compatibility with Boom-compatible and MBF-compatible WADs
• Native MIDI output on all major platforms — WinMM on Windows, ALSA on Linux, and Core MIDI on macOS— for low-latency music playback
• GPL-2.0 licensed with full source code available on GitHub
• Currently ships on SDL2 for the stable release, with the in-development branch migrating to SDL3 (≥3.4.0), reflecting active modernization of the platform layer.
• Active release cadence with 60 tagged releases documenting incremental improvements and compatibility fixes

What is Woof!?

Woof! is a source port for Doom that positions itself as a direct continuation of the Boom lineage, carrying forward the MBF (Marine’s Best Friend) heritage via Team Eternity’s WinMBF port, while incorporating modern quality-of-life refinements for both players and map authors. Its name is a deliberate pun: turning the Doom logo upside-down spells ‘Wood‘, and ‘Woof‘ was chosen as a cheekier alternative referencing dogs — a nod to MBF’s ‘Marine’s Best Friend’ name. The project is maintained on GitHub under the fabiangreffrath/woof repository, where its full changelog, issue tracker, and release assets are publicly accessible.

Origins and Philosophy

The Doom source port ecosystem is broadly divided between ports that prioritise modding expressiveness — often through scripting languages like ZScript — and those that stay close to the original engine’s behaviour while carefully lifting its arbitrary technical limits. Woof! firmly occupies the second camp. Rather than layering on a hardware-accelerated renderer or a bespoke scripting VM, Woof! extends the Boom/MBF foundation: the software renderer remains canonical, the demo-compatibility machinery inherited from that lineage is preserved, and the overall design philosophy treats faithfulness to Boom-era WAD behaviour as a first-class concern.

This makes Woof! a natural choice for players who want to experience the enormous catalogue of Boom-compatible and MBF-compatible WADs as their authors intended, without the overhead of a modern feature port or the brittleness of running decade-old binaries. The port targets the intersection of correctness and convenience, adding creature-comfort features only where they do not compromise compatibility with the established ecosystem.

Releases and Versioning

As of its latest stable release, Woof! is at version woof_15.3.0, published on 4 November 2025. The version history on the GitHub releases page documents 60 tagged releases, reflecting sustained, iterative development over the project’s lifespan. Each release page includes a structured list of new features, improvements, and bug fixes, giving contributors and downstream packagers a clear audit trail.

The pace of releases illustrates that this is an actively maintained project rather than a one-off preservation effort. Point releases tend to address compatibility edge cases, platform-specific audio and input fixes, and incremental feature additions, while minor-version bumps introduce more significant new capabilities.

Audio Subsystem

One of the more visible improvements in recent development cycles has been a thorough overhaul of the audio backend. Woof! 14.5.0 introduced support for native MIDI output across all major platforms — using WinMM on Windows, ALSA on Linux, and Core MIDI on macOS— moving away from a single software synthesiser dependency and allowing the operating system’s own MIDI stack to handle playback. For players with hardware or software synthesisers already configured at the OS level, this means Doom’s iconic music can be routed through those devices directly, improving both latency and fidelity relative to a purely software-synthesised path.

This kind of platform-aware audio integration is emblematic of Woof!’s approach to modernisation: the enhancement targets the underlying plumbing rather than visible surface features, and it is implemented in a way that is transparent to the player who simply wants music to work correctly out of the box.

IWAD Requirements

Like all Doom source ports, Woof! is an engine only — it does not bundle any commercial game data. Players must supply a compatible IWAD (Internal WAD) to launch the game. The canonical use case involves Doom II’s DOOM2.WAD, though the port also accepts other id Software IWADs. Forum discussions around Woof! frequently reference running the port as ./woof -iwad DOOM2.WAD -file LEVELPACK.wad, illustrating the standard command-line pattern for loading an IWAD alongside a custom level pack.

Boom/MBF Compatibility

The phrase “limit removing” appears frequently in discussions of Doom source ports and describes a category of port that lifts the static map and renderer limits baked into the original DOS executable without otherwise altering gameplay logic. Woof! operates at and above this level: it supports the full Boom extension set and the MBF monster-behaviour extensions, meaning that level packs marked as targeting these compatibility tiers will behave as designed. This is not a trivial guarantee — subtle differences in how ports handle sector specials, linedef types, or MBF21 codepointers can break a carefully constructed map, and Woof!’s explicit commitment to this lineage gives WAD authors a reliable target.

For players, the practical implication is that a very large fraction of the competitive mapping scene’s output from the mid-1990s through to the present day is playable in Woof! without the kind of renderer or gameplay divergences that a more feature-progressive port might introduce.

Platform Support

Woof! builds and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The audio subsystem notes in the release history specifically call out WinMM (Windows), ALSA (Linux), and Core MIDI (macOS) as native MIDI targets, confirming first-class support on those platforms. The Raspberry Pi forum community has also documented running Woof! on that platform, and a development build note states that the development release requires SDL3 version 3.4, indicating that the project tracks current SDL releases rather than pinning to legacy SDL2 indefinitely.

Binary releases are provided for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) and Linux through the GitHub releases page. No macOS binaries are distributed directly — the project’s own documentation notes that “macOS releases are not provided.” macOS users can instead install Woof! via Homebrew (brew install woof-doom). See our full guide on how to install Woof! via Homebrew.

License

Woof! is published under the GNU General Public License version 2.0, consistent with the licensing of the Doom source code as released by id Software in 1997 and the Boom port that followed. The full license text is included in the project repository as COPYING. GPL-2.0 ensures that all derivative works and redistributions must also be made available under the same terms, preserving the open-source nature of the codebase across forks and packages.

Getting Started

New users should begin at the releases page and download the archive appropriate for their operating system. After extracting the archive, placing a compatible IWAD (such as DOOM2.WAD) in the same directory as the executable — or specifying it via the -iwad flag — is sufficient to launch the game. The port also accepts additional WAD files via the -file argument for loading custom maps and mods.

For macOS users: Woof! does not ship pre-built macOS binaries. Install it instead via Homebrew: brew install woof-doom. IWADs should be placed in ~/Library/Application Support/woof

For users running Linux distributions that package Woof!, the port may already be available through the system package manager, though the packaged version may lag behind the upstream GitHub release. Compiling from source against the current SDL3 requirement will produce the most up-to-date build.

Community Context

Woof! exists within a rich ecosystem of Boom-lineage ports that includes projects such as PrBoom+, DSDA-Doom, and Eternity Engine. Each of these ports makes different trade-offs between strict compatibility, demo recording and playback accuracy, and added features. Woof!’s positioning within this space leans toward a clean, well-maintained Boom/MBF engine with steady quality-of-life improvements, making it suitable both for casual play and for users who want a reliable platform for the Boom-compatible WAD catalogue without the additional complexity of a full modern feature port.

The project’s issue tracker and release notes serve as the primary communication channels between the maintainer and the community, and the frequency of releases suggests an engaged development cadence responsive to user-reported issues and the evolving needs of the WAD-authoring community.

How to install Woof!

Woof! system requirements

Woof! vs other source ports

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• EXT Woof! 15.3.0 release — GitHub Releases API github.com
• EXT Woof! GitHub repository (fabiangreffrath/woof) github.com
• EXT Woof! releases index — GitHub github.com
• EXT Woof! LICENSE file (COPYING) — GPL-2.0 github.com
• EXT Raspberry Pi forum — Woof! SDL3 and IWAD usage forums.raspberrypi.com

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