Happy B-day, Doom!!!

Don't forget the whole shareware excitement thingy, Doom invented the whole "try before you buy" idea.

 

Now you sound like Al "I invented the internet" Gore. Shareware was around long long before Doom. At least back into the 80's, not sure about the 70's.

It certainly expanded awareness of shareware to more people than those that frequented CUGs/PUGs (Computer/PC User Groups) and BBSes though.

Regards,
SB

 

Ah, the memories, the memories. I start feeling old by now.

Back then, a friend of mine had a modem and had downloaded some freeware title from a BBS. We never heard of it, but he said it sounded cool, but it didn't run on his 386 SX. So we would take it for a spin on my parents 486 DX (was a DX with floating point co-processor? ) with another friend. The 486 was equiped with a sound card I had bought with my precious money. The record joy of playing Wolfenstein with sound was about to be broken.

Playing Doom for the first time with them was something I will never forget. The game looked almost photorealistic at that time. The adlib music was great at the time. And the sound effects were scary as hell. Everytime a fucking imp appeared out of nowhere with a roar made us jump from our seats.

The poor Amiga crowd at my school class, was already jealous about Wolfenstein 3D back then. They finally got a port to their Amigas (if I remember correctly). But with Doom, the PC prove again that it would become the dominant gaming platform for the new style of games. Poor Amiga people.

 

I was one of the AMIGA people

But thanks to 68030/50MHz +6882/50MHz I could play Doom and descent on my precious!
Besides my colleague had DX2/80 with VESA PRO VGA (later swapped for S3 Trio64 PCI) o which I've played DOOM and DESCENT .

My first real PC came in 1998 straight as almost hi-end P166MXX OC to 233MHz and 32MB!!!! of RAM. This thing played Duke3D 800x600 no problem

Good old times!

 

Descent! Man, when that came out I thought it was the shit...and that was before it had hardware rendering support.

Another great game that gets overlooked too often, it was pretty ground breaking when it came out.

 

Bah, Doom Schmoom. Really old PC gaming goodness is Prince of Persia, or Wing Commander 2 on umpteen 1.44" floppies, or Commander Keen, or Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Ultima VII, Ultima Underworld 1 & 2, Loom, Syndicate, Civilization, Sim City etc etc. Anyone remember 7th Guest?!

 

My first real pc was in 1999, pentium3 450, tnt2 ultra, diamond monster sound card, 256 MB ram. 18GB WD HDD, lol 18GB seemed so big. I got a 19" flat CRT and thought it was the coolest even though it stuck out like 2 feet in back.

I had actually played doom ages before on a monochrome display notebook actually, but with the new computer all my games certainly took quite a leap in visual fidelity.

 

Heh, Wing Commander 2 wasn't that many floppies. Now Win95...THAT was a lot of floppies. And Win98 was even worse, shudder...

Pffft, and those aren't all that old... Really old is things like Archon, Wizardry I - Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, Ultima I, Zork, Dungeon of Akalabeth (always spell that wrong), and lots of even older games that I can't even remember right now.

Regards,
SB

 

Win95 floppies were a fun and efficient way to sneak games. I have fond memories of copying doom2 on five disks, thanks to ARJ.

doom2 was my first ever multiplayer fps.. in 1999 with serial cables. I was amazed to pick up a PC at a thrift store for the equivalent of $10. that was a huge IBM 386DX with clicky keyboard and lots of ram, too bad it was only 20MHz .

you americans were extremely lucky with the BBS and playing over the phone. We never had free local calls.
btw I hated XP because it could not run multiplayer doom, nor even run doom with music.

 

I still have Tie Fighter on floppies.

 

Yeah, and having two PCs with giant CRT screens on the kitchen table was fun too

Oooooh, how I would like to get another one of those. It's also one of the best games ever IMHO.

 

Doom happened to be my first PC game too.

My first PC (Cyrix 486 DLC 40 MHz) was assembled from parts, and had zero software. I asked a friend (who himself had "converted" from Amiga to PC few months before I did) to bring some games and stuff (DOS, NC, etc).

I was really curious about Comanche, as I had seen it's voxel graphics in computer magazines. I wondered how would it look in motion... When the friend arrived, it went like this:

me: Jesus Christ, why didn't you bring Comanche??? I was asking you specifically for it!
he: Shut up and install *this*

I was caught totally off guard. Never heard about Doom at that time. Not even about the name. Not even about Wolfenstein 3D.

 

Hehe, all the stories, the other thing I find amazing about Doom I and II is that it was STILL selling very well at least up to 2000.

Heck at one store I worked at back in the 90's, Doom was outselling Quake 1 and Quake 2 combined.

Regards,
SB

 

I prefer high res software mode, and no looking up/down. Don't forget to improve the music : a free software midi synth, and a soundfont (such as "Silverspring Gaming 1.5")

then try 1_6tron.wad, I had it back then.. awesome . doom2 was awesome for the amount of wads and playing them in coop.
you may also look for the Harris levels, actually pretty good.

 

My first PC was a 8088 10MHz, with 768KB memory. A year later I added a 20MB harddisk. The display is a Hercules compatible monochrome graphics, with resolution like 640x400 or 720x348 (interlaced!). At that time, this computer can play many games designed for CGA display with some sorts of "CGA emulators."

Of course, this computer can never play Doom. My second PC was a 486-33 with a ISA color display card, which was bought back in 1992. I still remembered playing Doom with my friend over a modem. That's really incredible.

 

Who knew back then that such a good game would usher in the demise of creativity in most of the gaming world.

 

back then I played DOOM with a 386 DX 33MHz CPU. Cirrus Logic IIRC 1 or 2Mb VRAM. To get the game to spin faster I used the turbo button on the case to make the CPU run at 40MHz!

Later on I replayed it on a 486 DXII 66MHz and VLB Cirrus Logic 2 or 4MB VRAM graphic card. That mofo CPU overclocked to 80MHz with 40MHz FSB easily!

After that my 166MHz Pentium MMX and matrox Mystique 220 4MB and Voodoo 2 8MB though I moved on with times. Unreal, Half-Life and more. I also spent some time running Bleem! emulating PS1 games like MGS, GT2 and more. They ran with solid smoothness and greatly improved visuals and resolution on the CPU alone.

Never got into DOOMIII though. Granted I had the Xbox version but it felt uninspired IMHO. It also looked quite bad vs PC version with cut out sections and graphic.

 

It was (still is IMHO) fantastic in Deathmatch mode. Firing a mega missile at some poor soul as a door opens was pure joy

Ultima underworld 1 and 2 were great (but note the linear interpolation in the texturing). The only problem I had was UU2 simply would not complete/trigger the final sequence which was really frustrating and I played through it twice trying to do things in a different order. Hmm, I have the box in bookcase behind me.... I wonder if the floppy disk drive works in this pc?

I'll see your "Tie Fighter" and raise you an "X-wing on floppies".

 

I think I also have X-Wing on floppies, 3 or 4 floppies IIRC. Think I-war 2 is there somewhere to but I miss the first I-War games cockpit mode. Felt like a true captain representation.

X-COM TFTD was awesome and UFO Enemy Unknown to. Crusader No Remorse was awesome to but on my 386 I had to switch of sound to get decent perfomance. To bad as the music was good.