Anyone here play either Doom or Wolfenstein 3D when they first came out?

Yes but I am not a damn oldie.

GL Quake and 3dfx Tomb Raider patch FTW
 
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To me, I still think the moment that dropped my jaw the most was seeing GLQuake running on a 3Dfx card for the first time. At a whopping 20-30fps (at 640x480), it still looked light years better than anything I'd ever seen before. I ended up saving up and buying one immediately after seeing it.

I also recall some guy who went by "Zanshin" claiming that he had a 3dfx OpenGL wrapper that literally doubled performance on the game. People who knew the guy swore his claims were real, too. Apparently he got a C&D from 3dfx and his stuff never saw the light of day.
 
Picked up the Shareware version of wolf 3d when it first came out (I was a kid, I didn't have much money). Played it on our Packard Bell 386SX 25Mhz turbooo! Picked up Doom from babbages when it came out, it ran terrible on my computer. However my friend down the street had just gotten a 486DX2 I think, so we installed it there. So smooth! We hot seated and played through it there. Good times!
 
I played retail Doom when it first came out. Ran smooth at 35 FPS on a 66 MHz 486DX2 with 4MB of RAM. I believe the PC was one of the Axcel series that Packard Bell built in the mid-'90s, which my dad bought for work purposes from Circuit City. Installing Windows 95 on that thing was a PITA.
 
I played Wolf 3D on a home built 486DX4 100. It ran very nicely. I do remember it well because I was 32 at the time. I think I still have the floppy disk. Dang it!! :mad: Now I feel old.

Duke 3D was awesome looking, too!
 
I can't remember when I first saw/played Wolf 3D and whether it was release day or not, as I was just getting into BBS' at the time. I was 11 when Wolf was released but I did play a lot.

I can vividly remember downloading the shareware version of Doom the day it was released on a 2400kb/s dial-up modem. I remember being completely blown away by the graphics and just overall experience, I can still remember walking out of the start of E1M1 for the first time. We had a 386DX/33 with 4MB RAM and I want to say a Trident 8900 ISA video card? It ran OK but not amazing. We had a 486DX2/66 soon after that ran much better.

Seeing GLQuake and then multiplayer QuakeWorld for the first time on a friend's brand new 3DFX Voodoo 4MB was also an amazing experience as previously we had only really played 1v1 Doom over dial-up or maybe 4 player via serial cable (was that a thing?).

Ahh nostalgia. Until this thread I thought Wolf3D and Doom were much farther apart, but it was only 18 months or so.
 
I played doom v.98 (ish) the 'knee deep in the dead' level shareware/beta right after it got into the wild - just before Christmas. A friend brought it over and I had no idea my view of PC gaming was about to change forever. I was like Doom? What the hell is that?? It would crash at the end of each level about 50% of the time so you had to save right before hitting the exit button.. I remember forgetting to do that and being pissed when it crashed. lol. Good times!

I never really got into Wolf3d - the engine had such a stale feel to it - just didn't do anything for me. But I did like Rise of the Triad.
 
It was amazing at the time. I had Wolfenstein and eventually got spear of destiny. I only had a demo of Doom but I had a boot disk to play that game, I believe due to low hi memory or some such. My grandfather helped with that.

It was a 486 DX 33mhz with 4mb ram and a 1tb Trident video card.

Only performance issue was if you turned the turbo button off making it run at I think 16 mhz. Then it ran slow for Wolfe nstein and Doom...

My games were on 5 1/2 floppies too, LOL.
 
I played Doom though it was too hard think it was the controls on the PC
and Nintendo 64. When I first played Quake shareware online on M-player
that game was really fun the community and the M-player site application was a hoot.
 
I did play the original Wolf 3d, Doom, and Duke Nukem, but I really liked Wacky Wheels and One Must Fall 2097. I can't, for the life of me, remember the platforms I played them on though. :(
 
Yep, played the original Wolf 3d when it first came out on my old 286 @ 12mhz with 640KB of RAM and original soundblaster. Ran just fine too!

Had to upgrade for Doom though :D
 
I started thinking how great it would've been if Doom 64 had been on the PC with mouse/kb controls....

Well, someone did it!

Doom 64 EX

(Note: You must have purchased the original N64 cartridge to play)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sflyowXFTf4
 
yup doom quake at the time very nice looking back makes me laugh though
 
Ocellaris said:
I had a 486 SX33 and I played a shit ton of Doom and Wolfenstein. I recall the Wolf definitely ran better at the time.
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Same. Command Keen, too. I played the shit ouf of the Doom shareware.
 
horrorshow said:
Random thought: Heretic never got the love it deserved IMO.
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Quite, saved my money from cutting lawns the summer after it came out and picked it up at the PX in Ft. Levanworth. Played so much of it, didn't really care for Hexen for some reason...just felt kind of off compared to Heretic
 
horrorshow said:
Random thought: Heretic never got the love it deserved IMO.
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Hexen didn't either and I thought it was the better of the two. The game had an amazing atmosphere and fantastic sound. Heretic II and Hexen II on the other hand were both underwhelming.
 
Dan_D said:
Hexen didn't either and I thought it was the better of the two. The game had an amazing atmosphere and fantastic sound. Heretic II and Hexen II on the other hand were both underwhelming.
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Hexen certainly had a great atmosphere, no denying that.

Hexen II was, disappointing to say the least.

Personally, I preferred the old school run-n-gun gameplay of Heretic to Hexen's slower pace.

Course, also, if memory serves, didn't Hexen come out around the same time as Warcraft II?

That might explain why I didn't invest more than a couple of "school nights" playing it.... (Hexen that is)
 
I had a blast with both the Heretic and Hexen games. From memory, Hexen 2 didn't know if it wanted to be a shooter or RPG. I think I liked the idea more than the reality.

I'm not sure they could revive that franchise these days, but I wouldn't mind a twitch shooter with a fantasy/supernatural setting.
 
Domingo said:
I'm not sure they could revive that franchise these days, but I wouldn't mind a twitch shooter with a fantasy/supernatural setting.
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If they can re-make Shadow Warrior (the most obnoxious, racist, Duke Nukem clone ever) and make a decent game of it.

Anything's possible....
 
Played a ton of both (and Doom II) on a 486 DX2/66 with a 1MB VLB SVGA card, and an AWE32. Good memories. :D

horrorshow said:
Random thought: Heretic never got the love it deserved IMO.
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Sadly, no it didn't. One of the best "Doom clones" of the era if you ask me.
 
sure, but I didn't like doom as much because it was too dark.
I loved duke nukem though
 
silk186 said:
sure, but I didn't like doom as much because it was too dark.
I loved duke nukem though
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DOOM was too dark in comparison to Duke3D!? I think I get where you're coming from, DOOM was weird as far as satanic/religious stuff goes, but the inter-species stuff in Duke3D was fairly dark for me. Aliens invading Earth and doing nasty stuff to propagate their species kinda creeps me out more than a human entering Hell and destroying demons.

I'm mostly grateful that I was there to play these great games in their prime. This is where I look back and realize that, even then, PC gaming was ahead of console gaming. I loved playing console games in the early-90s, I'd even go as far as saying that this was the golden age of arcade and console games, but these PC games proved that even in those days the PC was capable of so much more than consoles. I enjoyed playing the Genesis and SNES at the time and I had a 486 PC, but DOOM showed that the PC could do so much more at the time.

I looked through videos of the 32X and Jaguar DOOM ports and it looks like they're running in low detail mode (32X with the window down a couple notches as I'd run it on my 486SX/33). I'm interested in what peoples' thoughts are regarding gaming during the late 80s and 90s--PCs VS consoles. I can see what the personal computer (not just x86 PCs because the Amiga was awesome) excelled in those days, but I spent most of my gaming time on the NES, SNES, and Genesis and I enjoyed it very much. My first online experience was with dial-up DOOM so PC has that going for it...

P.S. DOOM messed me up because it didn't have WASD.
 
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Played the hell out of Doom on my parents Pentium 1 66 mhz Packard bell. Half of the time playing was spent navigating to the executable from DOS and waiting forever for it to load. I played with the keyboard only because there was no vertical aiming, only horizontal. Didn't seem weird at the time
 
I seem to recall playing Bungies Pathways into Darkness before Doom. I had Apple until a certain point. But I did play Doom and Doom 2 realatively close to release, online co-op with a buddy. Or was it death match. Early 90's. I didn't go PC until Dark Forces.
 
Ryan7968 said:
WASD wasn't a thing when Doom was released. Didn't start becoming a standard until late 90's.
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Actually in the mid 90's, the ESDF and A for run was pretty commonplace....

At least for Doom 2 on DWANGO way back when.
 
Played a little of the shareware version of Wolf 3D on a family members computer as we only has a Tandy 286 at the time. But we soon got a 486 DX33 at home (later upgraded with to a Cyrix 6x86 PR 133+), played shareware doom. Bought myself Doom 2 with my bottle collection money, and spent considerable time making levels for it. Which was really confusing since it's not actually 3D (it was called 2.5D, you could never have anything directly above each other, which is why the elevators always had doors on both sides and the stairs looked like they do, you had these surface above and surface below things that allowed you to fake a lot).
 
Domingo said:
I had a blast with both the Heretic and Hexen games. From memory, Hexen 2 didn't know if it wanted to be a shooter or RPG. I think I liked the idea more than the reality.

I'm not sure they could revive that franchise these days, but I wouldn't mind a twitch shooter with a fantasy/supernatural setting.
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That was Heretic II. Hexen II was literally Quake with a Hexen skin. Oddly enough, Heretic II was the better effort of the two. While it was a different entity than its predecessors were, it was a fun game. Hexen II was late to the party and was pretty underwhelming in a lot of areas when it was finally released.

Ryan7968 said:
WASD wasn't a thing when Doom was released. Didn't start becoming a standard until late 90's.
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No, it was the late 1990's or early 2000's when WASD became the standard control mapping. Back in the DOOM days we used the mouse and the arrow keys. Some people remapped them of course, but that was the default.
 
Dan_D said:
Even on my i386 it ran better than that. I did have to reduce the size of the game window to almost as small as it could be.
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I had to do that with the 386sx/16MHz, otherwise it was a very pretty, and violent, slideshow. The day when all the parts for the AMD 486DX4 100 came I was giddy, it played DOOM engine games so well I forgot what sleep was. Didn't upgrade that machine until a Celeron 333(the 300A's were out of stock as everyone was overclocking them) to play some other game, hmm, I think it started with a Q :D.

emmjawsX said:
I got the shareware version of doom on floppy from a long-gone local pc store - thank god for having one parent that didn't care about violent video games and another that would play along side me :p

I'm pretty sure the family PC was a 386 then, it ran it pretty decent.
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My parents didn't know what the id software order form was that I handed them, glad they didn't. ;)

My first intro to DOOM was from a friend I sat next to in the computer lab. I had been switching back and forth between Wolf 3D and solitaire(yes I was addicted) when he noticed Wolf 3D. "Have you heard about DOOM shareware game?"
"Nope, what's that?" I replied.
"It's better than Wolf3D" said Brian.
"No way that's flippin' possible man." I chuckled.
"Serious, get your ass to Duffy's Computers and buy it."
They had one copy left. Loaded it up, thought it was kinda funny how the loading screen said "refreshing Daemon", though the Imps in the game turned out to be these brown sumbitches I learned to despise. Man was that game ever the best way to relieve tension.

Brian had MS and walked with canes, but he didn't allow that to stop him from getting an education or from playing kickass games at the comp lab. I wish I could shake his hand again for getting me away from that evil Solitaire. :D
 
I still rock the arrow keys :)

One of the main differences between Doom on the PC vs. the 32X I recall is that the enemies were never facing away. Because of limited resources, enemies were always facing you and they didn't have any assets for them facing other directions. Something like that at least.
The Jaguar version was great, though. Twitch aiming wasn't really an option, but otherwise it was like Doom running on a pretty good PC.
 
I remember using a Gateway2000 programmable keyboard for Doom, the nice thing was the lower diagonal keys I programmed to strafe instead of using the alt key. The F keys to the left were programmed for cheats. When Doom came out, I got the shareware version and got hooked and saved up my money for the full version from iD. I remember tying up the phone line playing a friend over the modem. I still have the 3.5" floppy disk, somewhere. I remember teaching myself how to make maps and .wads for Doom. I also played Heretic too which was under rated, never got on that Wolfenstien though.

here's a pic of keyboard:

z_011258prog.jpg
 
VF31Tomcatters said:
I remember using a Gateway2000 programmable keyboard for Doom, the nice thing was the lower diagonal keys I programmed to strafe instead of using the alt key. The F keys to the left were programmed for cheats. When Doom came out, I got the shareware version and got hooked and saved up my money for the full version from iD. I remember tying up the phone line playing a friend over the modem. I still have the 3.5" floppy disk, somewhere. I remember teaching myself how to make maps and .wads for Doom. I also played Heretic too which was under rated, never got on that Wolfenstien though.

here's a pic of keyboard:

z_011258prog.jpg
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atdt/ata? heh
 
My first PC was a AST 486SX/25 with 2 MB of RAM. At first it didn't play Doom, but after a $75 upgrade, I was able to play either just fine. There were a few games I couldn't play because of the lack of math coprocessor (DX CPU), but otherwise, I had a great time.
 
Played a shit ton of doom. My first personal pc when I was 13 was a 486dx4 100 that I spent the $2700 of my own money on back then. Worth every penny.

Wolfe Stein I played but I actually played dooms secret wolf left of Wolfe Stein more :)
 
Domingo said:
I still rock the arrow keys :)

One of the main differences between Doom on the PC vs. the 32X I recall is that the enemies were never facing away. Because of limited resources, enemies were always facing you and they didn't have any assets for them facing other directions. Something like that at least.
The Jaguar version was great, though. Twitch aiming wasn't really an option, but otherwise it was like Doom running on a pretty good PC.
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Jaguar version doesn't have music :(
 
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