Doom Is Twenty Years Old 225
alancronin writes with a quick bite from the Dallas News about everyone's favorite FPS: "Few video games have had the impact that Doom has on the medium as a whole. While it wasn't the first first-person shooter out there, it was certainly one of the earliest hits of the genre, due in no small part to its revolutionary multiplayer. Today, that game is 20 years old. Made in Mesquite by a bunch of young developers including legends John Carmack and John Romero, Doom went on to 'transform pop culture,' as noted by the sub-title of the book Masters of Doom."
Yesterday, but who's counting. Fire up your favorite source port and slay some hellspawn to celebrate (or processes). I'm partial to Doomsday (helps that it's in Debian).
"legends John Carmack and John Romero"? (Score:4, Funny)
That's like saying "Singing legends Elvis Presley and Right Said Fred."
One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong...
Re:"legends John Carmack and John Romero"? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"legends John Carmack and John Romero"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Although John Carmack's engine opened up a lot of possibilities, John Romero's level designs were also a big part of Doom's success. The key difference is that Romero hasn't done much since Daikatana landed with a thud.
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Although John Carmack's engine opened up a lot of possibilities, John Romero's level designs were also a big part of Doom's success. The key difference is that Romero hasn't done much since Daikatana landed with a thud.
Carmack hasn't done much either.
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Quake 4 was a great corridor shooter. People weren't much interested in that kind of game by then, but the engine was good, the gameplay was solid, the squadmate AI was actually good instead of annoying, the plot while simple was at least interesting. Really, both Carmack and Ravensoft did a great job with 4, but you had to be in the mood for a shooter.
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I'd go with Simon and Garfunkel.
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Hey, attacking Art Garfunkel isn't fair. He isn't the songwriter Paul Simon is but he helped in the latter's fame. Name Paul Simon to random people, they won't necessarily know him until you say he was the Simon in Simon and Garfunkel.
(Personal experience of the Graceland tour 2 years ago, and not just one person)
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I didn't "attack" him, but there's no question where the talent was concentrated. The only "random people" that wouldn't know Paul Simon probably weren't born yet when he was popular. Even children of the 80s would remember "Bodyguard" with Chevy Chase on MTV, if not the massive Central Park concert. Garfunkel gets name recognition because his name is extremely unique. "Paul Simon" is pretty generic.
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Art couldn't compose or write much, but Paul can't sing.
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Neither can Springsteen :)
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That was the B side to "Feelin' Groovy".
Re:"legends John Carmack and John Romero"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"legends John Carmack and John Romero"? (Score:5, Informative)
This is the opposoite of how Carmack tells it in his recent interview [wired.com]:
That was a decade-long fight inside id, really, about how open we should be with the technology and with the modifiability. The two things people were concerned about were, as you say: won’t people be able to make levels and sell them in competition to us? And there were certainly some specific cases, like the whole D-Zone game that came out with the package of a million or whatever different levels somebody could find scraped off the BBSes and put out there. We know some of those things sold really large numbers. So there was definitely an element of bitterness inside some corners of the company about that. I don’t think that they ever took anything from us; it’s not like we had a competing package.
But then the other side of it was the technological evolution question, where people said, aren’t we giving away some of our secrets? When we released our source code to the builder and those different aspects. And certainly tons of people learned from that, and did go on to build things, and you know, there’s an argument to be made that the company could have perhaps held onto a lead and an edge in the market better without doing that. But I think we came out net positive.
I was really happy a decade later when Kevin Cloud, one of my partners, said that I had been right to be pushing for doing that. Because he had been looking at it not so much from the community and technological openness standpoint, but as a business risk. Coolly looked back at over the years, I think we benefited more than it might have hurt us. But in truth, I was just doing that at the time because it was something that felt really right to me.
I still remember, at the time I was commenting about how I remembered being a teenager sector-editing Ultima II on my Apple II, to go ahead and hack things in to turn trees into chests or modify my gold or whatever, and I loved that. The ability to go several steps further and release actual source code, make it easy to modify things, to let future generations get what I wished I had had a decade earlier—I think that’s been a really good thing.
Re:"legends John Carmack and John Romero"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Holy crap there is a lot of bile in your post.
Doom was designed to be modded - you had the IWAD that stored the main game data, and you could load a PWAD with command line parameters. Those features were either put in by Carmack or blessed by him.
I'm intimately familiar with what the Doom community became after 1998 when Carmack released the source code (how many other companies do that?)
He was tremendously supportive of the community and personally replied to some emails I sent him over the years asking him about GPL licensing of old id stuff.
He's even got an account here on Slashdot.
The portrait you paint of him does not match anything I've seen or read about him, ever.
Ah the memories (Score:2, Insightful)
There were some fragging good times playing that with friends.
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There were some fragging good times playing that with friends.
Wow if Doom is twenty years old that makes me... scared
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Time flies
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Duke Nukem Forever is two years old. That make you feel better?
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I used to play video games almost everyday when I was young, Doom was released a decade later. I went to a computer fair and saw some mods for it that I thought were funny so I went ahead and picked them up {on a 3.5... yeah I know}.
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Think we finally found something we agree on. There must be some conflict we can find um.... best weapon was clearly the rocket launcher because....gibs thats why.
Re:Ah the memories (Score:5, Funny)
Bah, why isn't there an undo mod command. I accidentally hit underrated instead of overrated. Now I have to reply, lose a mod point, and can't mod anymore in this thread. Oh and so I have a relevant comment: iddqd I AM INVINCIBLE TO YOUR MODS!
Re:Ah the memories (Score:5, Informative)
Did you know that cold fjord liked Doom before you read his/her post? I believe we have all been informed.
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"up vote" and high UID. go back to reddit.
Bought from a shareware machine! (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember a friend and I bought the full version of Doom at a shareware vending machine at a local mall. We brought our own floppies and a two rolls of loonies to pay for it. Then spent the rest of the day taking turns playing on his 486. Good times! :D
Re:Bought from a shareware machine! (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow. I don't remember vending machines like that at all.
I do, however, remember loading programs off cassette tape. :-P
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READY.
LOAD
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
SEARCHING
FOUND DOOM
LOADING
?LOAD ERROR
SUCK IT DOWN.
bhsihbvhb ruif v riuvhwer ur viurvye whb ru wiu ergwer
65fub yuv54r ^5vdc ^ &r 856* ^t8V^*679
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LOL ... yup, that's about what I remember. ;-)
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Never happier than the day we got a VIC-1541 and put the days of pressing play behind me.
Re:Bought from a shareware machine! (Score:4, Funny)
I remember a friend and I bought the full version of Doom at a shareware vending machine at a local mall. We brought our own floppies and a two rolls of loonies to pay for it. Then spent the rest of the day taking turns playing on his 486. Good times! :D
You forgot the "eh".
Re:Bought from a shareware machine! (Score:5, Insightful)
The first machine I played it on cost in the areas of $2000. Now I can run it on a $10 MP3 player smaller than a pack of matches using RockBox. I kind of like the future.
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I first encountered Doom while training to do Win95 tech support. One day the trainer didn't show up so they just let us into the training room and told us to practice in the OS. Someone got wandering around the Microsoft network, found a network install of the game, and 25 of the 29 other people in class spent the next couple of hours playing Doom.
Then we found out why Doom was called "the unofficial network stress tester". They crashed the Microsoft network backbone. We got put on the support phones t
1st 1st-person shooter (Score:2)
I believe Wolfenstein 3D was the first, but I could be wrong about that.
Maze War (Score:5, Informative)
Maze War, 1973 [wikipedia.org]
Re:1st 1st-person shooter (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the wikipedia article on the FPS genre, Wolfenstein 3D was not the first FPS. Turns out that FPS games started in the 70's but were not released to the public (one was a US Army tank simulator). the first publicly released FPS was Battlezone released in 1980.
Wold 3D did however put the genre on the map. Doom had the privilege of being the first FPS with true modem and networked multiplayer.
Re:1st 1st-person shooter (Score:5, Interesting)
Other games like Descent, were more 3D, but as someone who designed levels in his spare time for the game, there's some weird stuff you can do in that game because the 3D engine was flawed, most likely to make it run fast enough. You could build a room with a floating cube in the middle. Put a door on one side of that cube. When you go through the door, you could enter a room bigger than the encompassing cube.
Re:1st 1st-person shooter (Score:5, Funny)
Was your cube blue, by any chance?
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See, for me, these are features, not limitations.
One set of directional controls. Look where you move where you shoot. That's controls I can have fun with.
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Doom map layout was definitely 2D, I remember very well having to use all kinds of tricks to get the illusion of full 3D, and some things just weren't possible, like bridges you could both pass over and under.
Doom 2 I can't say, never did any maps for that one.
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I think calling it auto-aim is a bit of a misunderstanding of whats going on. My experience with doom suggests that the shot hits the first creature that's vertically inline with the gun. It's drawn at some z coordinate, but there's no z axis in actual game play, it's just graphical sugar.
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The Doom Engine was built out of a BSP tree, each leaf node had the floor and ceiling height. Then each frame was rendered by scanning across the screen horizontally and rendering each vertical strip in turn. This was done by building up a set of texture lines going from a point at the top of the screen to a point at the bottom, so it would alternate between ceiling, wall and floor spans. Thus players could go up steps, and steps could be made to rise and fall automatically or be triggered.
The Quake engine
Re:1st 1st-person shooter Phantom Slayer! (Score:2)
First commerically available FPS? I nominate Phantom Slayer..1982
FIrst Person? Yes!
Shooter? Yes!
Spooky as well....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uFxq0dZ49c
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Ha! I remember driving for minutes and minutes just to see if I could actually reach them!
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It ate a LOT of my quarters, too, and I was in my thirties. I thought the coolest part, aside from the 3D 1st person graphics was the controllers; just like a real tank (or so I'm told).
BTW, since we're into gaming nostalgia, you might want to hit the link in my sig. When does Quake turn 20? It's only a couple more years, isn't it?
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Nice Christmas nostalgia.
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Well Wolfenstein 3d wasn't the first either, but it was on that set the bar. For the model of the 3d Shoot-em-ups. Which doom then used with some more advanced technology that made it move a little smoother and a little more interesting game.
I think TFA over did the multi-player. As you needed 2 computers next to each other over a Null-Modem Cable, so most people didn't play multi-player.
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Wolfenstein was functional. Played it for a long time before Doom came out.
Memories (Score:4, Insightful)
My first memory of DOOM was playing it on a 385 25MHz with 2 MB of RAM. Yeah, that ran like a slideshow. I couldn't understand the big deal. Shortly thereafter I got a screaming 486DX 66MHz with 8 MB of RAM. THEN I understood why the game was a big deal.
I feel silly, but I started playing this game pretty young, about 9 or 10. And I was terrified. Not enough to stop playing mind you. But the snorts of the imps in adjacent rooms really terrified me. If I wanted a bigger scare, I'd turn off all the lights. I sure played games differently then. Not like I play games now, where I stroll around with a cocky sense of invincibility, just soaking damage and pressing the kill button as fast as I can.
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Clearly you are playing the wrong games, or you're not playing them in "hardcore" mode.
Generally, players (and other things) die in 1 to 3 hits.
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I remember the days of doing 4 player games using serial ports (you had to have guys with 2 serial port machines in the middle) using some third party utility that I've long forgotten the name of. In college
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Ah yes, I remember playing Doom on a 386 with the view minimized as small as possible to make it playable. We had a 486 as well, the two machines cobbled together with Arcnet so we could play on the network. The guy on the 486 had a huge advantage in frame rate and larger viewing area, but only the 486 had a soundcard, so the guy on the 386 could get an advantage by listening to the sound from the other computer (you could guess how far away the opponent was based on the volume of your gunfire coming out
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I remember being sick one winter with a bad cold, sore throat, mild fever, but being bored out of my mind laying in bed, got up and played Doom all day, it took my mind off of my discomfort. (Some of those things
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Holy crap, when you start a level and hear a cyber demon, that was terrifying.
I love you... (Score:3, Funny)
...you love me..
BLAM!
We called them (Score:5, Interesting)
"Hi, we're calling because someone gave us a bootleg copy of Doom...
"And...?"
"We need the address, so we can send a check... how much do we owe you?"
The person on the phone, after recovering from their shock, gave us the address, and told us to make sure to include OUR mailing address with the check.
A few weeks later, we received a boxed copy of Doom, and a bunch of other cool swag.
Re:We called them (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We called them (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, back in the days when developers (and players) were (mostly) honest.
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I never knew those people. Most of my games for the Apple in the mid 80s came from a college-age uncle and every single one started with a "cracked by" splash screen.
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Then you were not one of the honest ones, you were one of the ones who's existence I implied with "mostly."
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My personal experience differs from yours. I saw plenty of evidence of piracy in my youth. I don't have any kind of scientific study* to point to piracy rates over time, and I suspect neither do you. I'm very suspicious that human nature has changed over the past 30 years. Hell, I'd argue that software piracy is the reason we are all stuck with no competition to MS Office today. Literally every home computer I have ever worked on for a friend or family member until MS started "activation" had a copy of the
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Huh? Where was that implied?
The parent of this thread didn't either, they paid for a legitimate copy upon finding out that they had a pirated copy. The developer responded by giving them some nice swag, instead of banning and/or lawyering up as one might expect these days.
Also, why are you responding to something I said in a post I didn't say it in? I assume slashdot's threading is to blame.
Re:We called them (Score:5, Interesting)
My first multiplayer game (Score:5, Informative)
Doom always reminds me of my first first person shooter multiplayer experience.
My friend got his first 1x CDROM/Soundcard package for his 486 SX 25, and it came with a bunch of free games. We haggled and traded these crappy games at our local computer shop for a Null Model Cable, after discovering the Intersrv.exe and Interlnk.exe files and reading the help /? and realising that we could get 2 computers to "talk" to each other.
After enormous amounts of trial and error, tweaking config.sys and auto exec.bat, we were able to copy the doom.exe using a null model transfer to another computer, and have player vs player games. We had a lot of fun and felt like this was the cutting edge of gaming, or at least in our world.
Doom for me is the foundation of all modern multiplayer games, regardless of it was the first - i still have fond memories of where it all started for me. It's mind blowing to think about the games industry these days and how it's evolved.
We didn't have search engines or ways to connect with other people of similar minds to solve the problems that we encounter. From these early gaming experiences I learnt enough about DOS and the PC to make it my hobby and later my career.
I owe Doom more than just many hours of entertainment, in a round-about way.
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I hope you managed to copy more than just the executable ;)
I remember playing via dialup. That was 'fun' (people kept answering the phone)
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A buddy of mine and I played Doom forever, heck we still do on occasion.
We didn't have the ability to play direct connect, so we discovered and figured out how to get modem play to work. we upgraded to USRobotics 28.8 DSVD modems, and figured out how to get them to work and how we could talk over the phone line while playing the game. This was all pre-internet days, so I had to figure out the AT Commands to enable DSVD, to dial, to answer etc. fun times. again lots of trial and error, dropped connectio
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"A buddy of mine and I played Doom forever, heck we still do on occasion."
This checks out.
This game LITERALLY changed my life. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd starting tinkering with computers about the time the MicroAce came out. I moved through the Vic, C64 and C128... and then to the Amiga. While I wouldn't consider myself a fan-boy, I supported the brand almost to a fault.
It wasn't until one day, in a Sears, I saw an Asus 486/DX2-66 for sale, and they were running DOOM on it. I bought a PC for no other reason than to play Doom.
I'm now an IT manager over our hardware repair and oncall function, and I owe it to the day I went "PC Compatible"... over a freakin' video game.
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I'm now an IT manager over our hardware repair and oncall function, and I owe it to the day I went "PC Compatible"... over a freakin' video game.
Kinda sad.
http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/NEXTSTEP [wikia.com]
If you need a Doom fix... (Score:2)
http://www.nongnu.org/freedoom/ [nongnu.org]
If your running a debian\ubuntu system, it's probably as simple as sudo apt-get install freedoom
I don't think you need a special PPA
I gather it runs on Windows, but I don't know much about that.
Brutal Doom (Score:3)
Brutal Doom is possibly the best Doom mod ever. Check out this review. [youtube.com]
Had a ton of fun with it. It's not extra levels, instead you play the same old levels with smarter monsters, heavier weapons and extreme brutality. The latter seems silly now, it's all just sprites, but I wonder how that would have been received in 1993.
Dear Google... (Score:2)
IF EVER office productivity needed a kick...
Why is the google doodle today NOT a playable version of Doom?
Make note. For the 21st bday, it should be a link to local liquor stores and a playable version... You have one year to get on that...
Sincerely
Everyone that does not feel like working today...
Because it's only 20 years old, not 95 (Score:2)
Doom tourney (Score:2)
We celebrated the 20th anniversary of Doom this year at RetroEuskal (which is held within Euskal Encounter in Bilbao, one of Europe's largest LAN parties with about 5000 people who bring their machines (Euskal Encounter itself has been going for 21 years now, it came out of the Amiga demoscene and still hosts quite a bit of demoscene stuff).
Here's the video I made of the tournament. Proper e-sports with prizes and everything :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukdDE96RN3w&noredirect=1 [youtube.com]
We also had a tournam
Doom fans everywhere (Score:2)
Check out DoomRL for a rougelike Doom experience. It works surprisingly well.
Doom was good... (Score:2)
Marathon was better.
It's a shame that Marathon was a Mac-only game for the most part, as a lot of PC gamers missed out on a great title.
Bungie later got their just desserts through the success of the Halo franchise, but said rewards were quite overdue by that point.
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Marathon does not hold a candle to Doom.
You've got that backwards :)
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Memories... (Score:2)
My first encounter of doom was when browsing the shareware rack at the local computer shop. I already had Wolfenstein 3D and loved the game and I remember it was made by id. So this Doom game was also made by id and looked interesting. Installed it on my 486DX-33MHz with 4MB ram and was blown away. Didnt run smooth but that was fixed when my father bought a 486DX2-66MHz with 16MB of ram for CAD work. what an amazing game and it sucked up hous of my time.
In high school our computer lab consisted of 486's (ei
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Doomed (Score:2)
Thanks, now I'm feeling old today (Score:2)
I'm going to sing the DOOM song now! (Score:2)
I remember downloading the shareware version of DOOM from a BBS shortly after it was released. Shooting at the soul sphere displayed in level 2 because I didn't' know what it was, and then almost falling over dizzy when I had to get up and go!
It certainly wasn't the first FPS to exist or even have networking (see Mazewar on the Xerox Alto), but it was the first to provide a fully immersive experience (full screen, all surfaces with texture, and sound) on a common desktop PC.
When I first heard of DOOM, and
It was a dark and stormy night... (Score:2)
Well, perhaps not a dark and stormy night, but a dull, windy and wet winter Saturday afternoon.
I was playing Doom on my 486, with headphones on on said dull afternoon. I had been playing a while and was really into it - Doom actually has great atmosphere with the music and the sounds of the various creatures and monsters shuffling around the map, and especially good atmosphere when played in a dimly lit room with proper headphones that cover the ears.
So my friend who I lived with at the time comes back from
DOOM is the most durable game franchise (Score:4, Interesting)
Other than Tetris, I can't think of a single game that's been ported to more platforms, and played more than DOOM has -- there are people right now, somewhere in the world still playing doom -- and I'm one of them.
What I enjoy about doom is that it's simply everywhere. I remember being at an E3, and among other new releases for the Super Nintendo (yes the 16 bit), was a DOOM cartridge. The fact that DOOM is available for practically every platform there is (although I have no bothered to confirm, I'm sure I can even play on an iPhone), one of my favorites was finding the engine for SGI machines and SUN platforms very early on -- so, yeah... you could play it on a cheap 486, or on your high-end $20,000 workstation, it was (and still is) literally everywhere.
My prediction is that regardless of what new platforms materialize in the future, some enterprising hacker will port DOOM to it, making the franchise one of the most durable in the history of videogames.
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The fact that DOOM is available for practically every platform there is (although I have no bothered to confirm, I'm sure I can even play on an iPhone)
You would be correct in that assumption [apple.com]
(Although I found the Doom2 RPG [apple.com] to be far more enjoyable game; FPS games and touchscreens are not a good combination)
But you are right about how widespread Doom has become in the computing world. According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], the following platforms had official versions of Doom ported to them
Computers: MS DOS, NextStep, IRIX,
Doom (Score:2)
I started out playing Pong. Zork and other nascent games followed. Our grandmother taught us how to program, since she was the first one in our part of the state to own one of the early IBM PCs (the one with the 4"x4" screen). Atari, Colecovision, Sega, Nintendo, were all part of our mother's milk, digitally speaking.
Doom in college, though, was the first time I felt horror at playing a computer game. When the T-Rex demons came for me at the climax, with the creepy music, I felt something past the usual
Problems recreating the original audio experience (Score:3)
I occasionally get nostalgic for those days back in 1994 but I have a big problem reliving them due to the sophistication of the audio in this game. You see, it was designed to play high quality MIDI if you happened to have a $1000 sound card. Of course I nor most of my friends did not have that... I had the standard soundblaster chip on my 486.
So when I play it in DosBox or whichever emulator, the sound is just too good! It is not the same as when I played it before!
Any tips on how to recreate that standard 1994-1995 486 experience aside from finding an old pc and installing win95?
Hmmm.... (Score:2)
Re:IDDQD (Score:4, Insightful)
IDSPISPOPD - that was the fun one.
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I remember having to turn off error correction and compression on the modem to this, because the "packetizing" of the data stream made gameplay very laggy otherwise.
You also needed a 16550A UART for smooth gameplay. Most PCs at the time had 8250s or 16450 which had NO BUFFER! Every byte that came in generated an interrupt, which slowed things to hell. The 16550A had a 16 byte buffer, but that was enough to solve the problem.
The first time I played 4-player multiplayer DOOM on a gaming BBS with a 16550A UART
I saw a Wolfenstein VR arcade game. (Score:2)
And the day I really wanted to play it was gone.
Re: Tunnels of Doom (Score:2)
Commenting because holy crap someone else that played that epic game. I still remember eating dinner while waiting for the game to load. Whole family played a character each. So many good memories...