Posted: . At: 11:59 PM. This was 7 years ago. Post ID: 741
Page permalink. WordPress uses cookies, or tiny pieces of information stored on your computer, to verify who you are. There are cookies for logged in users and for commenters.
These cookies expire two weeks after they are set.

Reminiscing on Doom and older computers in the modern age.

E4M8 Spiderdemon.
Dead Cacodemons.

Just saw a cool Let’s Play Doom video on Youtube that features E2M4 and the guy playing it is like he is playing it for the first time, it is incredible to watch the game played is if it is being played for the first time instead of always watching Nightmare speedruns and Ultraviolence demos. I loved playing Doom and creating maps for it like my Nightmare! map and Nukage Refinery. Making a Doom wadfile that is your very own is extremely cool and heaps of fun at the same time, there is nothing better than playing a map you have created yourself. This aforementioned map, Nightmare! is the largest map I have created and is quite challenging to play until you find the secret areas and the Megasphere and invulnerability artifact. Then you can rip and tear all you want for 30 seconds until the effect wears off.

The Linux pages on my website have lot’s of useful Linux information and tips to help you when setting up your system and dealing with any problems that may occur. http://securitron.securitronlinux.com/my_linux_system.php. Check out the page for some good downloads and helpful tips. Also I have my Linux kernel compilation page that gives a tutorial on how to compile a Linux kernel on your system to customize the desktop’s performance and add new features that may not be enabled in the default distribution kernel.

This can help when you want a pre-emptive low latency kernel and the default one is not. Although my OpenSuse 11.3 installation came with such a kernel after a major system update. Anyway, check out some of the stuff in the site/ folder and see what you can find, there are some gems in there. I guess my forums are not too popular, but I will leave them there anyway in case someone wants to post there, I thought that if anyone had any questions they could post there and I could answer them…

The first time I played Doom I was on a 486/sx 33 MegaHertz machine with 4 Megabytes of RAM and probably a 500 Megabyte hard disk drive, and a 14 inch monitor. I was playing at night and I loaded up Doom with C:\>CD DOOM C:\>DOOM and loaded up the game and saw the DOOM logo for the first time. I selected Hurt Me Plenty and saw E1M1 for the first time. I remember that I used to get quite hammered whenever I went up against a Shotguy or a Imp, and it was in E1M5 that I saw my first Pinky Demon. That was scary, I thought WTF is this? Once I saw a Pinky lean over to a shotgun sergeant and bite him and it looked like it bit his head off. I was shocked by the violence of that and the whole splattering monsters with a rocket launcher and then going down the hallway in E1M8 to fight the Barons, that was always accompanied by a feeling of foreboding that no games these days can really capture. I used to sit up at night for 8 hours straight playing Doom and it never got boring playing the levels of the shareware episode over and over again until I had worked out all of the levels and found the secrets. The look of the game running at 320 x 200 resolution in DOS was magical and no other game will ever match how I felt playing this new and violent game with it’s red menu graphics and blue floors, green nukage and blue water. In the 90’s this was the next best thing to virtual reality, and even on a 14 inch monitor it looked incredible and played so smoothly it was like a dream. I even dream t about some of the levels.

Later on I played the Doom registered IWAD and then Doom2, which I really enjoyed even though the level design is not up to the standard of Doom Knee Deep in the Dead. Why is it that the feeling I had playing such an old game is not captured today? I know the game inside out now and I can finish it in Ultraviolence mode easily, but that was not the case in the early days, I had to play for hours to finish the maps but it was worth it in the end. Then I discovered Operation Body Count and I moved from Phobos back to Earth, fighting giant rats in a sewer. That game uses a Wolfenstein 3D styled engine, with modern accoutrements such as computers and Islamic terrorists led by some guy named Victor. But getting back to Doom, I wish I could travel back in time and play the game for the first time all over again and feel that same feeling I felt when I first saw this incredible game a nice man who I have forgotten the name of who introduced me to some shareware game called DOOM. I always remember the excitement I felt playing this incredible game and even though modern games are copying the feel and style of the classic Doom, they can not come close to it at all. And unlike a certain game reviewer I could actually find my way around the Doom Shareware maps very easily and I did not get lost in the E1M1 like he did, how could that happen? You only need to open one door and go to another door and you have found the exit.

Speaking of reminiscing about the past, what about this? The good old turbo button on the old 386 machines, I wonder if any of my visitors remember this? I would love to get hold of a really old 386 or 486 tower case and build a super fast i7 or i3 machine in that box, sure you would have to modify it to fit ATX parts, but it would be really cool to have a sexy fast machine built inside a old looking case.

486 turbo button.
486 turbo button.

This case shown has a rocker switch on the front, instead of a modern push button, as well as the turbo and reset buttons. and a key lock that might be there to prevent someone from switching on the machine without permission. Not to forget there are two 3.5″ floppy drives for copying disks with DISKCOPY, as well as space for a CDROM drive above. This computer would have been pretty good in it’s day, but now it is sadly outdated and not worth the time to boot it up. Even a Pentium 4 can be had for pocket change these days, I would not want anything less than an i3 CPU. But if it is a 486 then it would run Doom fine.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.