How can ID release such crap with Doom Classic Complete?

I recently picked up Doom Classic Complete for the Master levels I didn't have ( I have the original collectors edition that sold just before Doom 3 released ). I tried to run this but it's just ported through Dosbox and on my machine it's glitchy and looks horrible..

I fired it up on GZdoom and it looks amazing since it uses OpenGL rendering. I get Dosbox is fully opensource and GZdoom has a GPL license but surely ID could have licensed it with the release. After all I spent $8 on 25 year old games. Regular price is $20

The idea about having it run in DOSBox is so the game runs as close to its original, intended state on modern machines as possible.

Seems like a petty thing to complain about when source ports are free, widely available, and easy to setup.

Yes I understand that and it took 30 seconds to dump the wad into Gzdoom,. but I get screen flickers, pops clicks and lost control trying to play it the way they intended. Also unless you load the specific version with " Classic controls ", it uses WSAD controls that are not very well laid out and you cannot change them.

All in all, I had never played the latest versions of GZdoom/ Zdoom with the hardware rendering, but it's amazing

I don't know, I"m happy enough just to get the wad file from ID and run it myself in GZdoom. I didn't get any of the flickers in dosbox but it did keep the god awful low resolution, so I don't play it in that, haha.

It's weird. I tried Doom II, and no flicker. Only Ultimate Doom. But yeah that resolution. I don't actually remember it being THAT bad

matt167 said:

It's weird. I tried Doom II, and no flicker. Only Ultimate Doom. But yeah that resolution. I don't actually remember it being THAT bad

Click to expand...

Well it's rendered at 320x200, and then DOSBox upscales it to your selected display resolution using bilinear filtering by default. So not only do you get a pixelated mess, but it is super blurry to boot. You can improve it by editing the .conf files to use one of the HQ or nearest filters instead. I would just use the Chocolate DOOM source port if you ever want to play the game as originally intended. The image actually scales up perfectly with this source port, giving clarity while still keeping it with that low resolution and pixelated look. DOSBox is great for what it is, but if alternatives exist as they do with id games then I would use those instead.

Yeah, those old dos resolutions definitely looked better on crt screens back in the day. Not so good on modern lcds.