John Carmack Departs id Software

Qinsp said:
I'm trying to remember what the 8086 chip default was. You'd have to turn the Turbo button off to start Doom IIRC.
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Being a 32-bit protected mode application, Doom wouldn't have run on an 8086. The minimum requirements stated a 386 but, in all practicality, a 486 was the minimum unless you wanted the window to be so small that you had to use a magnifying glass.
 
I'm excited to hear this news because of what Carmack can do for the Oculus Rift, it was the best news I heard when I he initially joined their team to help with the code (cuz they need it badly) it will not only alleviate whatever issues they're dealing with, but they got a key veteran architect handling the software personally himself. Plus, I think personally, Carmack feels he's outgrown his stay with Id but know they're in good hands so he can put his full concentration at Oculus. It's a win for the developers and us.
 
damicatz said:
Being a 32-bit protected mode application, Doom wouldn't have run on an 8086. The minimum requirements stated a 386 but, in all practicality, a 486 was the minimum unless you wanted the window to be so small that you had to use a magnifying glass.
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still pretty much a slide show on my 486 sx-25 vesa local bus.... but ran pretty well on a DX2-66... even better on a P90. :)
 
I'm building a Dinosaur machine right now, since it needs to run DOS at low speed. I found a copy of Warcraft on one of the old IDE 10gb drives.

At 0.500 ghz single core, with 0.128 gb of RAM and 0.016 gb of video, it is too fucking fast to play.

Are there hackers today that could do that? I'm not sure.
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C'mon Pat, you are calling a 500Mhz (most likely a P3 I assume) with 128MB of ram a dinosaur system, in regards to Warcraft I??? I would expect that game to fly on an anything over a P200 with 32MB of ram!

I am not sure if you can't find it anyone, but there is a program called "X86 SlowDown" that allows you to create a "virtual CPU" of any speed below your CPU's actual speed..I used it for WC2 back in the day..


revenant said:
still pretty much a slide show on my 486 sx-25 vesa local bus.... but ran pretty well on a DX2-66... even better on a P90. :)
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P90? pffft...I ran it on a Monster P100 with 8MB of ram, and a 2MB 3D card, right when Windows 95 was launched..It was the only machine I, or my family has owned that I didn't build (outside of notebooks, working them is bad enough)!

I remember being pissed that Intel launched the P120, then the 133, and then 166MMX back to back to back..It seemed like every month they were releasing a new model..I had the P100 O/C'd and then jumped to a K6 233 when Total Annihilation was the rage in HS..

On topic, Carmack was a true legend in the early days, and his engines have constantly driven things forward..I have never played RAGE, especially after seeing how many people RAGE about it (see what I did there:p) being crappy..But I have heard it did have very accurate shooting ballastics/sounds as lollerwaffle mentioned..
 
revenant said:
still pretty much a slide show on my 486 sx-25 vesa local bus.... but ran pretty well on a DX2-66... even better on a P90. :)
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I'm not surprised; the 486SX didn't have an FPU so floating point math (like the kind 3D games use a lot of) would have had to have been emulated in the software. The 486SX is basically in the same category as the 386.
 
If you wanted to game on a 486, you needed a dx, that fpu was almost mandatory. I also ran warcraft 1 on my dx4 no problem.

Man I remember upgrading to a 166mmx, with an s3 card, that system made Diablo 1 so playable!
 
I enjoyed Doom3 enough to play through it 3 or 4 times over the years. I've never been able to understand all the hate this game gets. Rage was a fine enough game, fun to play, right up until the non-existent ending; that left a bitter taste in my mouth, at least.

Regardless, having an accomplished programmer like Carmack working on the Oculus is good news. Now if they could just get the hardware finalized and get the damn thing on store shelves so I can buy one. Been so tempted to get the devkit over and over again this past year, but I would prefer to start my experience with the higher res display and optimized latency.

I still think Doom3 would be amazing in the Rift, with the fan made high res texture pak of course. I have heard not so nice things about the recent BFG edition, which if I am not mistaken, was supposed to have an Oculus Rift compatibility patch that never materialized.
 
A legend, and a huge impact on gaming, an erra of PC gaming gone. Memories of that time are all we have left, that time in PC gaming's history was amazing.

Have to say it though, RAGE was a huge flop. I don't know what the future of id gaming is, but it may not be relevant to gamers anymore.
 
John Carmack is my idol. All tech, no bullshit. Very few people like that. I don't really care about Oculus Rift, but I'll continue to listen or read whatever he has to say.

Masters of DOOM by David Kushner is a good book about Carmack and that asshole Romero :)D) at early id Soft. I devoured it.

It's funny, whenever a big game project ends badly enough, somebody somewhere ends up commenting: "there is a book there." There really is. This is something our's. This is part of our history. It should be documented.

RAGE hate is just people being unforgiving. And who can blame them, given the price they ask for a rushed product? RAGE has the best shooting mechanics to date.

It shows that the game's content was greatly scaled down. It's even half of what you actually play, because all maps have a later quest that follows them in reverse, with small changes. But the details, the quality is there. Graphics are astonishing, once you patch it and it actually runs :p.

It's a very good game, but you have to patch it and forgive the lack of content. I was left wanting to play a ton more. The ending is a clear cop out.
 
I really hope he will still stop by Quakecon for a talk, and believe he could be insightful at least for a few more years in regards to game engine technology.

Have an amazing time John in whatever you choose to pursue next.
 
RIP ID software.

Can't wait to see how much Carmack will change the VR scene, though. I've dreamt of completely immersive VR for as long as I've known videogames.
 
damicatz said:
Being a 32-bit protected mode application, Doom wouldn't have run on an 8086. The minimum requirements stated a 386 but, in all practicality, a 486 was the minimum unless you wanted the window to be so small that you had to use a magnifying glass.
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DOH!! Getting senile I suppose.

What we did before Windows, was to use DOS extenders like Phar Lap, and IIRC, both the Borland and MS C compilers also had extenders with them.

You still had to deal with the "640k" problem since certain things had to be directly addressable, but now you use the area above 1mb for FAR calls and variables? Something like that.

So a 80286 could run applications that were pretty big. WIth a 80287, you could run AutoCAD and other large programs.
 
Qinsp said:
If you weren't around in the DOS era, you would never understand how talented and innovative these guys were.
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This. Shit, he even developed some clever trickery for smooth-scrolling platform graphics for Commander Keen as I recall (indeed he did). Engine programming today isn't what it was back then, which isn't to say it's easier, but it's worth remembering that a lot of modern APIs, let alone engines, are built on that early pioneering work.

Anyway, good for him. id games have been glorified tech demos for a long time because they seemed to lack anyone who could push the game design as hard as Carmack pushed the tech. Now they don't have him either.
 
Qinsp said:
DOH!! Getting senile I suppose.

What we did before Windows, was to use DOS extenders like Phar Lap, and IIRC, both the Borland and MS C compilers also had extenders with them.

You still had to deal with the "640k" problem since certain things had to be directly addressable, but now you use the area above 1mb for FAR calls and variables? Something like that.

So a 80286 could run applications that were pretty big. WIth a 80287, you could run AutoCAD and other large programs.
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I believe Doom used DOS 4/GW which was pretty much the industry standard for mid-90s DOS games (DOS 4/GW came with Watcom C which was to C programming back then what Visual C++ is now). Doom itself was a 32-bit application so you'd need a 386 at a minimum; conventional memory isn't a problem with 32-bit protected mode because you can simply extend the segment size to cover the entire memory address space and avoid segmented memory altogether.

The 286 had a 16-bit protected mode but hardly anyone ever used it because the segmented memory access was awkward and there was no way to get from protected mode back into real mode without rebooting or using awkward hacks involving the keyboard controller.
 
Gotta disagree with that. DOOM was a DOS app.

All DOS apps had to deal the 640k and 64k issues. DOS cannot directly see anything above 640k. EMM386, etc, were how to get around it.

80286 was THE chip until Compaq released a stupid expensive 80386 system.

Borland C was the Big Dawg.

In any case, my faulty bioRAM says DOOM would run on 286's. I could be wrong, but I swore I never ran it on a 486.
 
Qinsp said:
Gotta disagree with that. DOOM was a DOS app.

All DOS apps had to deal the 640k and 64k issues. DOS cannot directly see anything above 640k. EMM386, etc, were how to get around it.

80286 was THE chip until Compaq released a stupid expensive 80386 system.

Borland C was the Big Dawg.

In any case, my faulty bioRAM says DOOM would run on 286's. I could be wrong, but I swore I never ran it on a 486.
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Nope, Doom was a 32-bit application. Minimum requirements were a 386 (although, for all practical purposes, anything without an FPU was unplayable).

DOS 4/GW bypasses DOS memory management completely. The only part that needs to worry about the 640k limit is the bootstrapper. The application itself does not.
 
I will have to just say, I don't remember that our 286's would not run it. I played it before I had a 486. and I never owned a 386, as far as I can remember.

Note that a 80286 is a segmented chip. It runs in "20 bit"? mode.
 
IIRC, the 386 was not that popular. It was expensive, nothing needed 32 bits, and you need to buy a stupid expensive 80387 chip to run any 32-bit software.

A tuned 286/287 was as fast in the real world, for about $1000 less.
 
Your memory is not correct. The 386 was a wildly popular chip, and no you did not need a 387 to run 32-bit software. Most people did not have one.
 
Qinsp said:
You have no clue how big the jump was.

It went from 2D Top View, Dungeons and Dragons, to 3D FPS in less than a month.

No change in the hardware.

Certainly it WOULD have happened. But there was no money in it. IIRC, most the games were free, or low cost, or not copy protected.

Believe it or not, all First Person Shooters are basically the same since Doom. They only got prettier. So a 80286-6 single core and a 128k video card could do what a machine over 4,000 times faster could do.

Think on that.

A first person shooter on a PC, could run solid at 0.006 ghz with 0.005 GB of RAM, and had single core graphics with 0.001 gb of RAM.

Much like the Apollo moon landing, I'm not sure it could be done today.

Now to REALLY fuck with you, the Sinclair 1000 had a 3D flight simulator that ran on 8,192 bytes of memory. Both program and storage. It cost $99.
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It doesn't matter and you are only proving further my point. People who worked on this stuff for a job or a hobby were very quickly going to screw around in their spare time and make a 3D FPS engine if it wasn't for Carmack. The claim their was no money in it has nothing to do with it. In fact just look at apple and MS, both stole ideas and employees from the Xerox team who's higher ups apparently did not see the money in it. It's pretty obvious that if people see any potential in something they will start working on it and do it even just as a hobby. In fact I could argue that Carmack and id really were not very forward thinking because their concept for the 3D FPS has failed in the long run, if he was so brilliant he shouldn't have allowed the quake franchise to crash and burn and be replaced. Its great that he and many others like to play and experiment with engines. And I respect his work but it is completely ignorant to make comments like we would be living in a completely different world right now. Just as ridiculous as claims people make that we would still be using console based applications if not for Apple / MS.
 
PhaseNoise said:
Your memory is not correct. The 386 was a wildly popular chip, and no you did not need a 387 to run 32-bit software. Most people did not have one.
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The Intel 386 chip and the Compaq machines were over twice as expensive as the 286's/

Look on Fleabay for old 386 machines. Then look for old 486DX family machines.

The 386 wasn't around that long.
 
A 80486DX cost less than a 80386+387 by a large margin.

And the hotrod 286/287's were nearly as fast for much less $.

32 bit was not popular in any area but CAD until after the 486DX was released. Think OS/2 and Microchannel. Just a small fraction of the market.
 
rudy said:
In fact I could argue that Carmack and id really were not very forward thinking because their concept for the 3D FPS has failed in the long run, if he was so brilliant he shouldn't have allowed the quake franchise to crash and burn and be replaced
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Well, just look at how well "their concept for the 3D FPS" has done over the years: the run-and-gun style gameplay is one of the more popular models in gaming now. Sure, id was at the right place at the right time to really cash in on it and aren't exactly on the top nowadays, but that doesn't mean they are failures IMHO
 
Qinsp said:
IIRC, the 386 was not that popular. It was expensive, nothing needed 32 bits, and you need to buy a stupid expensive 80387 chip to run any 32-bit software.

A tuned 286/287 was as fast in the real world, for about $1000 less.
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The 80387 was a math coprocessor that provided a hardware FPU (something that was later integrated into the main processor with the 486DX). You could still run 32-bit applications without an 80387.

Doom did not run on 286s.

See : http://www.classicdoom.com/doominfo.htm under System Requirements.

Simply put, as a 32-bit protected mode application, an 80286 would be incapable of running Doom.
 
Glad to see he is finally doing what he really enjoys. I saw an interview and he said that he is doing what he really enjoys, solving technical issues and things of that nature for Oculus. If anyone can push the RIFT forward, its John Carmack!
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Proof that it takes a whole team of people to churn out garbage games...as if EA, Ubisoft, and CCP haven't been proving that for years already.
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I would bet that iD devolved onto something that John had no control over and started down the wrong direction. If that is the case it would be time to bail.
 
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