Most of those games are closer to being Wolfenstein clones than Doom clones, with no changes in elevation of the floors and ceilings and walls that only meet at 90-degree angles.
And even the game at 7:15 is less than that, more like a dungeon crawler like Dungeon Master but with inbetween animations. Although an interesting retro game.
Yea.. about 90% of the "doom-clones" was really wolf3D clones. Wolf3D was realized half a year before the Amiga 1200. To me it was not Wolf3D or Doom that made the PC, it was Maximum overkill. Looking at it, it was resized the same year as wolf3D Comanche: Maximum Overkill The reason why PC was that "slow" is actually quite surprising. It had to do with the way pixel was writen on the PC in the EGA and CGA days. PC could only put pixels on the screen, and it have to be addressed one and one. This was painfully slow. Even with a 16 bit graphics accelerator running at 6Mhz and 16 bit, pushing 12MB per second. In theory should be able to write more than 100 frames per second. But becasue it address one and one, it could rather just write 20-30frames per second.. That still is a lot. The worse part is that when the CPU was writing, it was 100% occupied with that. Making the CPU lose a lot of time that other vice could be used to render the games. When VGA came along they write whole line of data in steed. Making it possible to write 60 frames per second only using 15-20% of the CPU time. While PC was sheelded to use the performance with crapy EGA grapics adapters, the CPU preformance was quite superior. The 386 was almost the base line CPU back in 1992-1993 for installed systems, and the 486sx was baseline for cheep PC builds. A friend of my built his own PC of old part he goten of the dump in 1994. What he could not get was a CPU and MB. The cost of a brand new 386DX 40Mhz system was $50 MB and CPU. Compare that to a A1200 with a 14Mhz CPU 68020 that is fairly similar to the 386DX in design. So can you play doom on a 386DX40 for $50 in 1994... Well no... Because memory was still expensive. 386 boards generally just have 4 memory sockets and the only one that was avalible at the dump at the time was 256kB SIMS (He later bought 8MB of memory, and the year after a 486DX4.. it was a way to get into the PC market fast and cheap, it did work)
I don't think it's just the fact that we address one and one (you mean pixels here?). In software rendering you will still need to write pixel by pixel at times. I don't think VGA had a blitter like the Amiga (where a separate chip would fill a whole line with pixels, either copying from a pattern or making logical operations and more, while leaving the CPU free to do other stuff). Maybe it was a pain on EGA (and also VGA 16 color mode) which used bitplanes like the Amiga. CGA was more like CPC, but one byte will hold 4 pixels so in order to change an individual pixel one has to read a byte, mask the bits and write back, more costly than writing one byte to fill a whole pixel as in VGA 256 color modes. VGA also had the chain-4 mode which is the easiest at the time, but outside of this there were some modes like Mode-X (that people call bitplanes but it's not exactly that as in the Amiga) that were a bit of a pain. So, yes VGA would be easier to write individual pixels for say a 3d texture mapper. Now the Mode-X could be exploited in other ways to fill much faster single color flat polygons like for early flight simulators for example without texture mapping or gouraud shading. But at the end you could also exploit CGA and EGA with good programming, at least for 2d games, they have much less data to move, 16k and 32k, so less data moving around than VGA. And then of course there is hardware scrolling which I think everyone of these mode supported but maybe it was a pain in the ass (In VGA you had to enter Mode-X for hardware scrolling enabled, CGA has similar chipset to CPC which has hardware scrolling by changing vram address, I don't know about EGA though). So anyway, I'd guess it was rather the fact that when CGA/EGA was out, most games supported the 8088 which is very slow, and the gamedevs didn't manage to learn to optimize their games more for these video modes and maybe nobody cared much about PCs at the time and they made shitty ports, before they moved to VGA where it started getting serious and that was the time we also had faster CPUs (it can be a pain in the ass to make things fast even on a 386/486 with VGA especially if you are not an experienced developer). There are few demoscene demos on oldschool PCs for CGA or EGA (although most of them moved early on on VGA) that show more are possible. Oh,. also graphics card bandwidth. The best ISA 16bit card I had, Tseng Labs ET4000 would max out 80fps to fill those 64k even with assembly code doing 32bit writes, doesn't matter if it's on 386 or Pentium. Just to fill the screen with white. The same write to regular ram would make 500fps on a fast 486 for example. Later Vesa local Bus and PCI cards of the time would change that. CGA has 16k to fill and EGA 32k to fill, so things like clearing the screen or copying a background or sprites would be faster on these, but of course other pixel rendering things like texture mapping, line rendering, etc would be easier to code and maybe faster on VGA.
Optimus6128 The 8514 graphics adapter had blitter. Later known as SVGA, it actually was first introduced in 1987. Of cause, only the grapics adapter was as expensive as a A500. Anyway VGA don´t have a Blitter, but it have latch registers.Its not as fast, but its heck of a lot faster than the cumbersome system EGA used. Also of cause, VGA cards generaly had higher buss-speeds than EGA cards that also helped. The downside was that this method used quite a bit more memory than to write directly., Also just about every EGA card was 8 bit, and its related to the 8088 processor. Of cause, i would say games that was made in late 80-tys was not designed for 8088 processor, rather 8086 or 286 processors. But the legacy 8 bit EGA buss is still there. I never seen a 8 bit VGA card.. would guess it don´t exist. "would max out 80fps to fill those 64k " That don´t sound right. CGA have 64kB of memory EGA got 128 VGA got 256 standard (expandable to at least 2MB) Of cause, EGA only uses about 32kB of memory in game mode and VGA usually use 76kB in game mode A ISA on a 8088 would have 8 bit width and 4,7Mhz speed, making a total of transfer rate of 4,7Mbyte/second. This equates to 36 frames of full screen EGA resolution or 72fps in normal gaming resolution. Of cause this would tie up the processor to do that. Even for a 6Mhz 286 it will still be really slow. EGA is not close to be that fast. The reason is addressing. So that make me wounder, would it be possible to interleave the Grapics output with calculating the pixel. It would be quite hard to make the code, but if its made once it could probably work with most 2:d games.
I remember waiting for the school bus in about 1992-ish, a school friend was bragging about his PC with a whole 1Mb of RAM. The rest of us were in awe (I think I had a CPC 464 at the time, before moving on to an Atari STE) Wow how we've moved on.
One whole MB of RAM? Pawltry. I was one of those lucky few whose father got a discount via his job on new computers back in the day, and I got his hand-me-downs. So, I got 80386 DX 40Mhz with 4 MB of ram. I could play Ultima 7 in its full PC glory back then. And Doom too.
brickman409 you have a decently powered phone and about 5 bucks? You have vr. It's not as amazing as the pc stuff, but its holding me over until I can save up
+chistine lane Yeah, I know I have a cardboard headset, it's cool, but it's not the HTC Vive that I'm craving. Which is why it reminds me of this guys story. He had to settle with cheap knockoffs until he could eventually afford the real thing.
Yeah, but then you add the cost of the Vive on top of that and it brings it up to like $1400. And a 1060 3GB is like bare minimum for VR, if you're going to spend that kind of money, you might as well just go all the way and get a 1080. That being said, I guess I could just sell the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and GPU from my current PC and then get a new GPU, Mobo, RAM, CPU. Then I wouldn't have to buy a new case, PSU, storage, and OS. That would save me some money.
Give it a couple of xmasses, and VR headsets will be nice 'n' cheap. My friend bought a mobile phone, Alcatel Android smartphone, for 15 quid brand new the other day. Plus £10 for credit. There's enough in a smartphone to make a VR headset. Perhaps you'd need a slightly higher-res screen and maybe the MEMS movement sensors need to be better. But they still sell that phone at a profit. Of course mobile phones are a very mature market now. VR is still at the beginning. There was the false start in the early 1990s, but hardware, all of it, wasn't ready then. LCD screens, computer rendering, and especially motion sensors were useless. No MEMS, just weird unreliable analogue magnetic field sensors, and primitive IR emitters with lo-res cameras. MEMS wasn't even invented. Nintendo, I think more than anybody, brought MEMS sensors to the mass market with the Wii. The Wiimote was the first time most people met a MEMS motion sensor. They're way more accurate than the old methods, weigh less than a gram, and are cheap enough to stick a couple in any accessory you can think of. Cameras (IR cameras are just normal cameras with a filter) are so cheap, you can buy a complete wristwatch phone for 7 dollars, and it has a camera in it. An unfortunate side-effect of cameras becoming cheap as dirt, is mass surveillance. Bummer. Now is the beginning of managing to do VR profitably. The tech has been here a couple of years. The first mobile phones for the common man were very poor technically, compared to now, and expensive. Now they're supercomputers for less than a week's shopping. If VR takes off on the PS4 and maybe the Vive etc, it'll start to get cheaper very quickly. Couple of years time we might be here commenting as little holographic heads in TH-cam VR.
considering what your parents were throwing at you clearly they weren't thinking, regardless of the outlandish cost of a pc in the late 80s through the mid 90s your parents must have spent 2 or 3 times that much supplying you with sub par machines.
I remember that around the 1995 my uncle had a PC with 100Mhz processor, we played Doom on it, it was in Poland, the country dirt poor at the time by comparison to the West.
Not really, the Atari Jaguar was $250.00 and the Sega 32X was $150.00. They are hardly the cost of a PC in 1994. Even the 3DO at $699.00 was not even close to the cost of a PC back then. I chased Doom on console for a full year. I had the 3DO, 32X, and Jaguar before I built my first gaming PC. My father had a Pentium 1 PC at 66mhz and he got it when they were first introduced. He paid well over $3,500.00 for it and why he didn't want me to play games on it. My first PC was a 486DX2 and it ran Doom really well but cost almost a thousand dollars. I started working in early 1995 for my uncle's computer business. He paid me very well and why I was able to buy both the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation in 1995 (PlayStation launch). Consequently, they were the first consoles I ever purchased with my own money.
PCs back in the day (talking 486 33-66mhz) cost about 500$ USD for barebones. You threw in a couple of peripherals and a 2d card + sound card and you're up at about 700USD. If you were looking at a system with a CD ROM, then add another 500.
@@cameronward9443 Very true, but I was lucky to have an uncle that got my stuff at cost. My parents paid just over $450.00 for my 486DX2. Now, I did not have a CD ROM and only really wanted it for Doom.
Especially if you didn't buy a brand new one; considering the prices, computer stores still gave you trade-in premium because they could sell the second hand PCs for a good chunk a money; which made it almost as cheap to buy a brand new PC, than to upgrade parts. Anyway, stores had plenty of second hand PCs waiting to be bought for the keen observer.
If you bothered to watch the video you would of heard him say at the start he could not afford a PC at the time. Had he or his parents could don't you think they would of just gone out and brought a PC which could of ran Doom in late 93 early 94, use some of those brain cells which are in your head.
Zero Tolerance was notably impressive for not using any additional hardware to run, but also being one of/maybe the first console shooter to feature co-op. Sure, you needed 2 genesis consoles, 2 tvs and 2 copies of the game and an adapter but it worked, apparently.
I'm pretty sure it was the first console co-op/deathmatch FPS. Interestingly, when I got the game, it came with a little postcard you could send to Accolade to receive a free Genesis/Megadrive link cable to play the game co-op. Although my country wasn't listed as one of the places they would send a cable to, I sent the postcard in to see what would happen and they sent me a free cable anyway. I still have it lying around somewhere. How cool is that? So I was all set for my buddy to get his copy of Zero Tolerance, which he was so psyched to do since he was the one who told me about the game first place, and we had planned to spend many sleepover nights in the glow of our little black and white portable TVs with our Megadrives linked up playing Zero Tolerance once he got his copy. He never did, though.
I don't know about all those technical achievements, but JUST that shading effect or whatever in the title screen blew me away. I mean, I've seen some Genesis demoscenes so I know this console is capable of some very impresive things, but I still was totally impressed by that effect alone.
I felt the same way about Wolfestein 3D on the SNES. Ignore the censorship, and focus on the fact that its running as well as it is, on a stock cart, with no special chips. Sure they're both very pixelated games, but PCs were expensive in those days, and if you only had a console, this was the trade off.
God dam I loved Zero Tolerance. It was all us console plebs had. I remember going to my rich friends house (he lived in a gated community that is in a PGA golf course) he was playing Rise of the Triad. I went home and played Zero Tolerance on my 19 inch TV.
Most of us had no PC back in the day either....thankfully colleges and unis across the land did and students like us infected their networks with thousands of installs of this fabulous game. From what I remember, multiplayer Doom (IPX/SPX protocol) caused massive headaches for the network admins of the day.
I was one of the lucky kids who actually had a PC. It wasn't the highest end. But I could play Doom. Granted I either had to choose Full screen graphics, in low-res mode, or with a border in high-res mode. Still, I had it better than most.
It must be something else you're thinking of as I own Distruptor on the PS1(imo it's not very good.) I'd say Exhumed/Powerslave is the best DOOM clone (although it's significantly harder.)
The microcomputer history over on your side of the drink is fascinating . It's almost like a alternate universe of computer development. Love your channel.
That was fantastic. You did a great job of weaving the personalised (and mostly shared) nostalgia in with the game details and, well, they do _call_ you the _Nostalgia Nerd_. I reached Doom from a different passage. Born 1985 I was a console only kid up until 96 and was the first of my friends to own a PC so to me my first experience of it was on my friend's SNES and it didn't compel me to even ask for it for my own. Once I played it again on my friend's PCs, that friend's dad being a computer technician and hardware enthusiast, I was enthralled. And yes there were multiple PCs in the same room which to me in an 11 year old in 1996 was staggering - two high end machines for LAN multiplayer. That massive boost in quality - speed, control, graphics, the _music_, and the multiscreen multiplayer brought me up to the appropritate level of obsession.
The moment Doom came into existence marked a genuine pivotal shift in playground computer rivalry. For the first time, PC owners could say, "my PC kicks your Amiga's botty"... and be *right*. From then on, the battle was about PC MHz vs. PC MHz. Everyone was jumping on the 486 bandwagon, but was it the el cheapo, bottom of the ladder SX-25 or a proper DX machine?
It's a pity it took so bloody long for the PC to get to that point. Maybe if the Americans had bought Amigas - or at least clamoured for proper graphics and sound cards in their overpriced 286 IBM clone business boxes - instead of spending all their money on consoles, later PC owners wouldn't have been so screwed over by the console exclusives running on hardware that limited the scope of the games.
it took so long for pc because silly humies were thinking that pc is only for office work. when they realized it can run 3d games like doom, the pc hardware started to expanding mega fast
On a much delayed and somewhat relatable note; I had the same feeling when I looked in awe at the commercials for Oblivion. No one's PC I knew could run it and no one had an XBOX360 yet, but IT LOOKED AMAZING and I wanted to play it for YEARS. It made that union of man and game so much more meaningful
Damn, now I feel really bad for you.. My dad bought doom almost immediately, had multiple computers to run it, and I was practically raised on it, playing deathmatches and coopertive games with my dad and/or sister when I was 5, and already mastering the game and repeatedly playing "Go 2 it" on nightmare mode with godmode on just make all the monsters fight each other and watch the spectacle when I was 7. Even now I still make massive great fun doom mods and play doom at least 2-infinite times a week. I guess you could say I was a DOOMED child.
I get into PC gaming just for Doom. I sold my Sega clone called "Songa" and bought a 486 DX4 just to play it. And when you described what you felt the first time playing Doom, it was like I was talking. Amazing video!
Thanks for the video. Although I was a Pc owner from the start, we weren't able to get one up until 1989 since up until then Romania was sealed off from the West in the so called Eastern Bloc. I played a few games up until Doom, like Commander Keen and Dune (my all time favorite adventure/so much more game from that era), I will never forget the first time I fired that shotgun in Doom. I am going to be 30 years old in July and had a few PC and laptop changes over the year, but one thing was always constant: Doom and various mods and wads on whatever system I had. It is the single best shooter that exists, even in this modern era, in which I can't stand most shooters and go with games like Amnesia or SOMA. But if I want to shoot something up, it's DOOM DOOM and DOOM, although with Brutal Doom or Project Brutality/Russian Overkill modifiers. Again, thanks for the video, sorry for the long comment.
Oh no here we go again, doomers drool again about how this is the only shooter that make them tick and about how modern shooters are the most despicable thing ever. You guys are the tolkienians of the video game world, every fantasy book that is written after tolkien is always not tolkien therefore treated with contempt right away without a .modicum of discernment
I discovered doom when i was 20 in 1995. I tought i had enough of vidéo games at that time, I thought I had seen everything, I thought everything had already been done. I was wrong
I dreamt of playing Doom for years and being teased all the time with magazine screenshots and TV shows. When I finally played it, it was nearly a religious experience XD
Doom is amazing. Despite me playing it late, hell, even finding out about it for the first time in the late 2000s, it still gives me those nostalgic chills and the warm feeling of exploding guts every time I see it. Never having played any non-star wars shooter games until 2008 only makes this stranger. Damn, my first game was Mario Sunshine on its release after all. Was the best 6th birthday.
Great video and lots of nostalgia! I totally went gaga over Doom Pc during the craze (in fact i nearly got a 32x for it) and wanted my fix on console since they were the only machines we had. I loved zero tolerance at the time despite being utter utter shit now. Thank god i got to play Exhumed and Duke Nukem on the Saturn
What's super interesting to me, as a 'murican is hearing the differences between our quest to have PC's that could run doom WELL enough vs the entirely different but utterly similar situation of trying to find a console to run on it. Ironically in my own case my first FULL playthrough of doom occurred not on my 386/16 that I'd tweaked to run 24mhz but actually was on the SNES! HAH. Just one of those shared cultural experiences my kids will never understand when they get older. Thanks for sharing yours.
In 1997, I played Doom on a PS1 and using a link cable at a friend's house. Sometimes, I miss those days, but taking a console with a copy of the game, a link cable and a CRT across the other end of the city was a tedious task when your household didn't have a car at the time.
1993, the main reason I purchased my very first PC, a Gateway 486DX 66 with a 424 MB HD, was to play Wolfenstein and then Spear of Destiny. I played so much Quake II online that I actually booked off sick from work to do so. Those were some real fun, exciting times.
Interesting fact for the game at 4:00. Every wall texture is symmetric horizontally if you notice. I was reading an interview from the programmer somewhere and it was mentioned, they software render upper half of the walls and then with hardware trick they mirror the other half. Nifty trick and works with alien textures for a space game :)
Very good video as always :) May i suggest you also make one for the doom clones that have appeared on 8bit machines, like the ZX spectrum port ( which is unbelievable! ), commodore port, etc!
This was such an interesting video to watch. I was lucky enough to have a brother who was into PCs 2 years after Doom released. Doom, Warcraft and Diablo were my lifeblood back in the day. I live in the Philippines and I'm pretty sure no one knew what I was on about when I scribbled the names of these games on my pad paper in school at the time.
There was a huge surge in 486 machines between 92 and 94 in Germany, due to the likes of Vobis and Escom. In just a few years, we've all had swapped our 64s, Amigas and STs for PC boxes. Good times!
Enjoyed that, thanks. My introduction to Doom was on the Apple Performa 630 in 1994 BUT, no sooner had our [Mac users] prayers been answered and we got Doom on the Mac than Bungie’s ‘Marathon’ came along and blew it out the water! Ahhh, good times.
I'm really happy for you that you can access your childhood glee so easily today. I spend a considerable part of my monthly income trying to recreate it, but it's always out of reach...
I had a 386DX/40mhz running Doom in '93. I try to tell people what Doom did to the FPS/PC scene and they just simply don't understand. Doom holds a special place in my heart!
As a brazilian, I'm shocked that you guys up there didn't have easy access to IBM PCs. I remember playing Doom around January 1994, though I was lucky to live in the third biggest city here, and to have relatives that worked with computing. Doom was the first time I saw a first person shooter as well, though I always imagined what it'd be like to explore all the unreachable places in my Master System games. Also, it was set to DM mode, between a Pentium and a 486 if I recall it correctly (maybe a 386 and a 486? one of those was really laggy). My mother's cousins were blasting each other on their computers and I was just standing there shocked by the whole thing, waiting for my turn to play Super Mario World or some shit on the other room. After that I'd go to their house all the time to play Doom, then Heretic, then I finally got my PC, when my uncle brought me Duke Nukem 3D. Even with Duke 3D in hand, though, I'd still rather play some Doom, which was less advanced, but much more fun.
I remember back in the early 90's that at our Secondary school, the computer labs had 286's for the 9th form and above and the teacher had his lone 386 DX with a one speed caddy-loading CD drive which he use to play Doom on during Lunch break. His gaming antics went unnoticed because he timed his playing to coincide with the daily task of running several Dot Matrix printers and the deafening noise they produced. Hence why it was done during at that time, as it was to disruptive, as the noise could be heard several classrooms away. Fun times.
Oh GLOOM!!! so good! :) Great Video - totally there with you on DOOM!!...I have in on every retro console I own... SNES, Saturn, GBA, GB Micro, Pimped up Amiga A1200 with 040, CD32 with 030,.
I used to be pretty contemptuous of Doom clones, but then again I was spoiled by being too young to remember when a IBM PC was beyond my dad's budget. (He was always the one obtaining cool computer games, mom couldn't care less.) I really appreciated this fascinating peek into all the lengths people went to get their Doom fix before the game was easily obtainable.
2 years late to the party, but I LOVED Zero Tolerance for the Genesis! I too was hunting for a machine that could play Doom, but ZT actually turned out to be more fun. The game is WAY longer than you would think, and the levels are interesting and fun to play.
I'm England based, and extremely lucky that my dad worked in the PC business, tbf you're slightly incorrect about us UK'ers not getting decent PC hardware, my dad used to build them and sell them, we had a pretty bitchen DX266 486 machine so I had doom pretty much when it came out. It is indeed a masterpiece and remains my favourite game of all time.
Quake was the shooter that hooked me. My first foray with Doom and FPS games was on the 32X till I got a PC and Dark Forces. From there I learned about Quake and Duke3d, two games that would cement my desire to play them. Quake was my first real online multiplayer experience. It was exhilarating and at the time felt like magic that I could play this game against other people so far away.
I remember the first time I saw them. I was blown away. I'm always blown away when I play it never seems to get old. Sometimes today's games are almost too realistic.
6 ปีที่แล้ว
It was very interesting to hear, that by the time you got the third or fourth expensive computer system for your birthday, most of us had not seen a real computer in Eastern Europe. :(
I almost died from sun poisoning working on a farm to buy a Jaguar and AvP. Severe second degree sunburn that left me raw and bloody, coupled with a newly discovered and quite severe alergy to hay that added hives and swollen face to top it off... But the reward was soooooo sweet. Till I realized that AvP was technically god like and licked windows in terms of delivering on gameplay even equal to Wolfenstein... But since it was still the first FPS I had ever experienced, I was spared the realization till well after I had a very fond foundation of memories for it. To this day, it is still the best AvP ANYTHING ever made and possibly my most desired reboot I wish for.
I remember almost switching back to Win 95 from Windows 98, because Doom at the time would not run on it. Nowadays, I still veg out on Doom at least a few times a month. Mostly on my Raspberry Pi.
Everytime i pick up a shotgun in an FPS game now, i expect it to be a pump action to go along with the episode 1 level 1 background music from doom that will no doubt be stuck in my head. Many FPS shotguns have disappointed me over the decades. None make you feel quite like the badass that Doom 1993 did
I remember when we got the Doom share ware in 93, we had a nice new Packard Bell with 2 megs of ram. My dad the hero went out and bought a 4 meg expansion chip so we could run it, with 2 megs to spare. Deathmatch with a 9600 baud modem was my year...
Have you thought doing a "Not quite doom" clones round up for the PC? We had quite a few back in the day. Games made after Doom, but ran on the Wolfenstein 3D engine, or a derivative thereof. These actually filled a hole in the market too. You had people who really wanted to play Doom, but their PC wasn't quite up to snuff.
1993 The year I looked at my Amiga 2000 and thought ......time for you to go.. So long good friend you have served me well... Now thats delt with, time for DOOM!!!!
Really enjoyed that. I think I was leading a very similar life to you only without the Amigas. I had the shareware version of Wolfenstien on my IBM 386 and only got to play Doom on the snes then the PS1 when it was released. Still a huge fan to this day am 45 now 😊
While I love Doom, its funny how much nostalgia plays a role here. All the way through the video I was thinking about how much I miss my Amiga and thinking how much I was Commodore had kept up. Still, whatever your machine of choice - great vid!
Nothing quite compares to the amazement of seeing Doom for the first time.Doom didn't just change gaming forever, it dethroned the Amiga and forced people to recognise the PC as a capable gaming platform.
Happy days, my first PC upgrade was caused by Doom's release. I bought an extra 256kb memory chip for my Trident VGA card along with an extra 512kb memory module and then sweated buckets fitting them myself.
Aah, I remember playing Death Mask on my poor old A500 because the Doom was out of my reach too at that point. A few months later my good friend got a brand spanking new and shiny 486 IBM PC, we never played Death Mask again. It was time for Doom!
Did you guys not have Blockbuster or was it gray area to rent games in the UK...I honestly dont know. I rented Zero Tolerance from Blockbuster around the time it released. I loved it despute its technical issues. I lived that you coukd keep shooting people and aliens, making the fly back. I have never heard of the other game, it sounds awesome. A question about the Atari ST, could they be upgraded? Could you say add those chips or perhaps (more likely...maybe) chamge the mobo on it?
worked at a BT technology training centre around '94 & although there were tons of different computers, touch screens, video disk machines, even satellite tv nothing was capable of running Doom. just before I moved on in '95 we got 8 new Dell computers with networking which effectively did me out of a job. even though by that point I had a PS1 & Doom alongside I couldn't resist putting Doom on the Dell pc's as a parting gift. hope whoever used those machines enjoyed playing Doom instead of dumb work 😊
Brings me back... A friend showed me the world of DOOM. He even made me a copy of the floppy disks but the two PCs in my house were old or not powerful enough. I had a IBM AT 286 with EGA graphics and my Father's computer was a 486 with VGA but only 2MB of RAM. So I just played Wolfenstine 3D. Didn't get a chance to play DOOM until early 1996 when dear old dad upgraded the memory in his 486 to 16MB but he also tossed on Windows 95. Also at that time I didn't have the floppies anymore but got a box set of Ultimate DOOM and DOOM 2 for Christmas. However this had a Windows 95 port (DOOM95) to the game and ran damn awful because it wanted a Pentium. Didn't find out the CD had the DOS port until a year after I got a decent Pentium II based system.
My mate showed me Doom on his PC in the dark on release. "I've got a game that's right up your boulevard" I remember him saying. OMFG. I was shit scared from the first second. But when the mesh cover of his large floor-standing fan decided to detach and catch the blades all fucking hell broke loose. I will take that memory to the grave. That night spelled the end for my Amiga 1200 and I went to PC, but not before trying to fool myself that Gloom and AB3D would be equals.
I think the Amiga did a pretty good job with it's Doom clones all things considered even getting a port of Doom years later. Zero Tolerance is also really underrated.
I was really waiting for Alien Breed on the Amiga, only to be surprised to the max how bad that game has aged!! In my memories it really looked a whole lot better. As far as I can remember the gameplay was at least decent. Great review, liked to hear the story from your perspective. I'm glad Doom was able to impress you, after all those years and games in between lol
You review old computer & gaming tech and you're a Doom fan? +Subbed! Doom is my all time favourite. The day I got home and heard my dad say "The shareware's finished downloading!" was one of the greatest gaming moments ever. I miss co-oping and DMing with him. :D
I was a little too young to remember the Doom launch ( I was probably playing Mario paint or Final Fantasy 2), but the first time I played the demo for Quake 2 in 1998 on my Gateway PC, I was forever hooked on first person shooters. Doom,Hexen, duke nukem, Half-life, alien vs predator on jaguar and one of my personal favorites, Escape from Monster Manor on the 3DO
That was pretty much my reaction in 1993. I actually built a 486DX2 from old terminals in '94ish to play Doom and Doom2. Never say never when it comes to the Genesis, apparently there is a working version of Wolfenstein running on a stock Genesis. I often wondered it the Sega CD could have run a version of Doom. It had rotation and sprite scalling with tons of memory (for its time).
Most of those games are closer to being Wolfenstein clones than Doom clones, with no changes in elevation of the floors and ceilings and walls that only meet at 90-degree angles.
And even the game at 7:15 is less than that, more like a dungeon crawler like Dungeon Master but with inbetween animations. Although an interesting retro game.
Yea.. about 90% of the "doom-clones" was really wolf3D clones.
Wolf3D was realized half a year before the Amiga 1200.
To me it was not Wolf3D or Doom that made the PC, it was Maximum overkill. Looking at it, it was resized the same year as wolf3D
Comanche: Maximum Overkill
The reason why PC was that "slow" is actually quite surprising. It had to do with the way pixel was writen on the PC in the EGA and CGA days.
PC could only put pixels on the screen, and it have to be addressed one and one. This was painfully slow. Even with a 16 bit graphics accelerator running at 6Mhz and 16 bit, pushing 12MB per second. In theory should be able to write more than 100 frames per second.
But becasue it address one and one, it could rather just write 20-30frames per second.. That still is a lot. The worse part is that when the CPU was writing, it was 100% occupied with that. Making the CPU lose a lot of time that other vice could be used to render the games.
When VGA came along they write whole line of data in steed. Making it possible to write 60 frames per second only using 15-20% of the CPU time.
While PC was sheelded to use the performance with crapy EGA grapics adapters, the CPU preformance was quite superior. The 386 was almost the base line CPU back in 1992-1993 for installed systems, and the 486sx was baseline for cheep PC builds.
A friend of my built his own PC of old part he goten of the dump in 1994. What he could not get was a CPU and MB. The cost of a brand new 386DX 40Mhz system was $50 MB and CPU.
Compare that to a A1200 with a 14Mhz CPU 68020 that is fairly similar to the 386DX in design.
So can you play doom on a 386DX40 for $50 in 1994... Well no... Because memory was still expensive. 386 boards generally just have 4 memory sockets and the only one that was avalible at the dump at the time was 256kB SIMS
(He later bought 8MB of memory, and the year after a 486DX4.. it was a way to get into the PC market fast and cheap, it did work)
I don't think it's just the fact that we address one and one (you mean pixels here?). In software rendering you will still need to write pixel by pixel at times. I don't think VGA had a blitter like the Amiga (where a separate chip would fill a whole line with pixels, either copying from a pattern or making logical operations and more, while leaving the CPU free to do other stuff).
Maybe it was a pain on EGA (and also VGA 16 color mode) which used bitplanes like the Amiga. CGA was more like CPC, but one byte will hold 4 pixels so in order to change an individual pixel one has to read a byte, mask the bits and write back, more costly than writing one byte to fill a whole pixel as in VGA 256 color modes. VGA also had the chain-4 mode which is the easiest at the time, but outside of this there were some modes like Mode-X (that people call bitplanes but it's not exactly that as in the Amiga) that were a bit of a pain. So, yes VGA would be easier to write individual pixels for say a 3d texture mapper. Now the Mode-X could be exploited in other ways to fill much faster single color flat polygons like for early flight simulators for example without texture mapping or gouraud shading. But at the end you could also exploit CGA and EGA with good programming, at least for 2d games, they have much less data to move, 16k and 32k, so less data moving around than VGA. And then of course there is hardware scrolling which I think everyone of these mode supported but maybe it was a pain in the ass (In VGA you had to enter Mode-X for hardware scrolling enabled, CGA has similar chipset to CPC which has hardware scrolling by changing vram address, I don't know about EGA though).
So anyway, I'd guess it was rather the fact that when CGA/EGA was out, most games supported the 8088 which is very slow, and the gamedevs didn't manage to learn to optimize their games more for these video modes and maybe nobody cared much about PCs at the time and they made shitty ports, before they moved to VGA where it started getting serious and that was the time we also had faster CPUs (it can be a pain in the ass to make things fast even on a 386/486 with VGA especially if you are not an experienced developer). There are few demoscene demos on oldschool PCs for CGA or EGA (although most of them moved early on on VGA) that show more are possible.
Oh,. also graphics card bandwidth. The best ISA 16bit card I had, Tseng Labs ET4000 would max out 80fps to fill those 64k even with assembly code doing 32bit writes, doesn't matter if it's on 386 or Pentium. Just to fill the screen with white. The same write to regular ram would make 500fps on a fast 486 for example. Later Vesa local Bus and PCI cards of the time would change that. CGA has 16k to fill and EGA 32k to fill, so things like clearing the screen or copying a background or sprites would be faster on these, but of course other pixel rendering things like texture mapping, line rendering, etc would be easier to code and maybe faster on VGA.
The Amiga has sprite graphics. It's main designer was the same guy that designed the Atari 800.
Optimus6128 The 8514 graphics adapter had blitter. Later known as SVGA, it actually was first introduced in 1987. Of cause, only the grapics adapter was as expensive as a A500.
Anyway VGA don´t have a Blitter, but it have latch registers.Its not as fast, but its heck of a lot faster than the cumbersome system EGA used. Also of cause, VGA cards generaly had higher buss-speeds than EGA cards that also helped.
The downside was that this method used quite a bit more memory than to write directly.,
Also just about every EGA card was 8 bit, and its related to the 8088 processor. Of cause, i would say games that was made in late 80-tys was not designed for 8088 processor, rather 8086 or 286 processors. But the legacy 8 bit EGA buss is still there.
I never seen a 8 bit VGA card.. would guess it don´t exist.
"would max out 80fps to fill those 64k "
That don´t sound right.
CGA have 64kB of memory
EGA got 128
VGA got 256 standard (expandable to at least 2MB)
Of cause, EGA only uses about 32kB of memory in game mode and VGA usually use 76kB in game mode
A ISA on a 8088 would have 8 bit width and 4,7Mhz speed, making a total of transfer rate of 4,7Mbyte/second. This equates to 36 frames of full screen EGA resolution or 72fps in normal gaming resolution. Of cause this would tie up the processor to do that. Even for a 6Mhz 286 it will still be really slow.
EGA is not close to be that fast. The reason is addressing.
So that make me wounder, would it be possible to interleave the Grapics output with calculating the pixel.
It would be quite hard to make the code, but if its made once it could probably work with most 2:d games.
I remember waiting for the school bus in about 1992-ish, a school friend was bragging about his PC with a whole 1Mb of RAM. The rest of us were in awe (I think I had a CPC 464 at the time, before moving on to an Atari STE) Wow how we've moved on.
One whole MB of RAM? Pawltry.
I was one of those lucky few whose father got a discount via his job on new computers back in the day, and I got his hand-me-downs. So, I got 80386 DX 40Mhz with 4 MB of ram. I could play Ultima 7 in its full PC glory back then. And Doom too.
Your quest to find hardware decent enough to play Doom in the 90's is similar to my quest to find decent enough hardware to play games in VR
brickman409 you have a decently powered phone and about 5 bucks? You have vr. It's not as amazing as the pc stuff, but its holding me over until I can save up
(you can get most vr phone goggles or Google cardboard (which is the same but home made for about 5 bucks if you know where to look)
+chistine lane
Yeah, I know I have a cardboard headset, it's cool, but it's not the HTC Vive that I'm craving. Which is why it reminds me of this guys story. He had to settle with cheap knockoffs until he could eventually afford the real thing.
Yeah, but then you add the cost of the Vive on top of that and it brings it up to like $1400. And a 1060 3GB is like bare minimum for VR, if you're going to spend that kind of money, you might as well just go all the way and get a 1080.
That being said, I guess I could just sell the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and GPU from my current PC and then get a new GPU, Mobo, RAM, CPU. Then I wouldn't have to buy a new case, PSU, storage, and OS. That would save me some money.
Give it a couple of xmasses, and VR headsets will be nice 'n' cheap.
My friend bought a mobile phone, Alcatel Android smartphone, for 15 quid brand new the other day. Plus £10 for credit. There's enough in a smartphone to make a VR headset. Perhaps you'd need a slightly higher-res screen and maybe the MEMS movement sensors need to be better. But they still sell that phone at a profit.
Of course mobile phones are a very mature market now. VR is still at the beginning. There was the false start in the early 1990s, but hardware, all of it, wasn't ready then. LCD screens, computer rendering, and especially motion sensors were useless. No MEMS, just weird unreliable analogue magnetic field sensors, and primitive IR emitters with lo-res cameras. MEMS wasn't even invented.
Nintendo, I think more than anybody, brought MEMS sensors to the mass market with the Wii. The Wiimote was the first time most people met a MEMS motion sensor. They're way more accurate than the old methods, weigh less than a gram, and are cheap enough to stick a couple in any accessory you can think of. Cameras (IR cameras are just normal cameras with a filter) are so cheap, you can buy a complete wristwatch phone for 7 dollars, and it has a camera in it. An unfortunate side-effect of cameras becoming cheap as dirt, is mass surveillance. Bummer.
Now is the beginning of managing to do VR profitably. The tech has been here a couple of years. The first mobile phones for the common man were very poor technically, compared to now, and expensive. Now they're supercomputers for less than a week's shopping.
If VR takes off on the PS4 and maybe the Vive etc, it'll start to get cheaper very quickly. Couple of years time we might be here commenting as little holographic heads in TH-cam VR.
Further proof that Doom, even years after its release, was the sharpest tool in the shed.
considering what your parents were throwing at you clearly they weren't thinking, regardless of the outlandish cost of a pc in the late 80s through the mid 90s your parents must have spent 2 or 3 times that much supplying you with sub par machines.
I remember that around the 1995 my uncle had a PC with 100Mhz processor, we played Doom on it, it was in Poland, the country dirt poor at the time by comparison to the West.
Not really, the Atari Jaguar was $250.00 and the Sega 32X was $150.00. They are hardly the cost of a PC in 1994. Even the 3DO at $699.00 was not even close to the cost of a PC back then.
I chased Doom on console for a full year. I had the 3DO, 32X, and Jaguar before I built my first gaming PC. My father had a Pentium 1 PC at 66mhz and he got it when they were first introduced. He paid well over $3,500.00 for it and why he didn't want me to play games on it. My first PC was a 486DX2 and it ran Doom really well but cost almost a thousand dollars. I started working in early 1995 for my uncle's computer business. He paid me very well and why I was able to buy both the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation in 1995 (PlayStation launch). Consequently, they were the first consoles I ever purchased with my own money.
PCs back in the day (talking 486 33-66mhz) cost about 500$ USD for barebones. You threw in a couple of peripherals and a 2d card + sound card and you're up at about 700USD. If you were looking at a system with a CD ROM, then add another 500.
@@cameronward9443
Very true, but I was lucky to have an uncle that got my stuff at cost. My parents paid just over $450.00 for my 486DX2. Now, I did not have a CD ROM and only really wanted it for Doom.
Especially if you didn't buy a brand new one; considering the prices, computer stores still gave you trade-in premium because they could sell the second hand PCs for a good chunk a money; which made it almost as cheap to buy a brand new PC, than to upgrade parts. Anyway, stores had plenty of second hand PCs waiting to be bought for the keen observer.
Wants to play Doom more than anything else -> Gets virtually everything but a PC to run Doom....
Well... I guess it's a form of dedication😆
Assuming even half of what he said was true
@@ScottJoC probably was, kinda the same happened to me with half life 2 i didn't had the pc to run it until 2008
I was lucky to get two games a year, let alone two systems :o
If you bothered to watch the video you would of heard him say at the start he could not afford a PC at the time. Had he or his parents could don't you think they would of just gone out and brought a PC which could of ran Doom in late 93 early 94, use some of those brain cells which are in your head.
Zero Tolerance was notably impressive for not using any additional hardware to run, but also being one of/maybe the first console shooter to feature co-op. Sure, you needed 2 genesis consoles, 2 tvs and 2 copies of the game and an adapter but it worked, apparently.
I'm pretty sure it was the first console co-op/deathmatch FPS. Interestingly, when I got the game, it came with a little postcard you could send to Accolade to receive a free Genesis/Megadrive link cable to play the game co-op. Although my country wasn't listed as one of the places they would send a cable to, I sent the postcard in to see what would happen and they sent me a free cable anyway. I still have it lying around somewhere. How cool is that?
So I was all set for my buddy to get his copy of Zero Tolerance, which he was so psyched to do since he was the one who told me about the game first place, and we had planned to spend many sleepover nights in the glow of our little black and white portable TVs with our Megadrives linked up playing Zero Tolerance once he got his copy. He never did, though.
I don't know about all those technical achievements, but JUST that shading effect or whatever in the title screen blew me away. I mean, I've seen some Genesis demoscenes so I know this console is capable of some very impresive things, but I still was totally impressed by that effect alone.
I felt the same way about Wolfestein 3D on the SNES. Ignore the censorship, and focus on the fact that its running as well as it is, on a stock cart, with no special chips. Sure they're both very pixelated games, but PCs were expensive in those days, and if you only had a console, this was the trade off.
Sherbert's World of Schlock: SNES Doom was using the Super FX chip though, not a stock cart.
God dam I loved Zero Tolerance. It was all us console plebs had. I remember going to my rich friends house (he lived in a gated community that is in a PGA golf course) he was playing Rise of the Triad. I went home and played Zero Tolerance on my 19 inch TV.
Most of us had no PC back in the day either....thankfully colleges and unis across the land did and students like us infected their networks with thousands of installs of this fabulous game. From what I remember, multiplayer Doom (IPX/SPX protocol) caused massive headaches for the network admins of the day.
I was one of the lucky kids who actually had a PC. It wasn't the highest end. But I could play Doom. Granted I either had to choose Full screen graphics, in low-res mode, or with a border in high-res mode. Still, I had it better than most.
Bloodshot was an absolute shock. What really blew me away was the co-op multiplayer and VS style arena mode. Really impressive for the Sega
Disruptor for the PS1 is by far the best Doom clone ever made, simply brilliant
That was the first game by Insomniac, if I'm not mistaken?
That would be correct
***** I had thought so. Thanks.
It must be something else you're thinking of as I own Distruptor on the PS1(imo it's not very good.) I'd say Exhumed/Powerslave is the best DOOM clone (although it's significantly harder.)
The two aliens FPS's on PS1 were excellent.
1:46 HAHA My first PC was a Zeos 486DX2 full tower. It came with what was then, absolute top of the line 385 MB HDD!
The microcomputer history over on your side of the drink is fascinating . It's almost like a alternate universe of computer development. Love your channel.
You should have mentioned PO'ed for PS1.
Or Jurassic Park on snes (the interior segments)
Funny you mention that considering Nightdive announced a remaster.
When DOOM was released I had a 486 DX/2 66Mhz with 8 megs of ram. Ahhhhhh, memories.
I feel bad when i see 8mb of ram people cause all I have is a laptop with 4 megs
That was fantastic. You did a great job of weaving the personalised (and mostly shared) nostalgia in with the game details and, well, they do _call_ you the _Nostalgia Nerd_.
I reached Doom from a different passage. Born 1985 I was a console only kid up until 96 and was the first of my friends to own a PC so to me my first experience of it was on my friend's SNES and it didn't compel me to even ask for it for my own.
Once I played it again on my friend's PCs, that friend's dad being a computer technician and hardware enthusiast, I was enthralled. And yes there were multiple PCs in the same room which to me in an 11 year old in 1996 was staggering - two high end machines for LAN multiplayer.
That massive boost in quality - speed, control, graphics, the _music_, and the multiscreen multiplayer brought me up to the appropritate level of obsession.
The moment Doom came into existence marked a genuine pivotal shift in playground computer rivalry. For the first time, PC owners could say, "my PC kicks your Amiga's botty"... and be *right*. From then on, the battle was about PC MHz vs. PC MHz. Everyone was jumping on the 486 bandwagon, but was it the el cheapo, bottom of the ladder SX-25 or a proper DX machine?
+dreamkatcha Agreed. I was hugely chuffed with my DX2/50.... even with the Pentium on the horizon.
+Nostalgia Nerd WOLF3D marked this shift earlier.
+dreamkatcha Doom was also one of the first games I played, and went "There is NOTHING like this in the arcades...at all!"
It's a pity it took so bloody long for the PC to get to that point. Maybe if the Americans had bought Amigas - or at least clamoured for proper graphics and sound cards in their overpriced 286 IBM clone business boxes - instead of spending all their money on consoles, later PC owners wouldn't have been so screwed over by the console exclusives running on hardware that limited the scope of the games.
it took so long for pc because silly humies were thinking that pc is only for office work. when they realized it can run 3d games like doom, the pc hardware started to expanding mega fast
On a much delayed and somewhat relatable note; I had the same feeling when I looked in awe at the commercials for Oblivion. No one's PC I knew could run it and no one had an XBOX360 yet, but IT LOOKED AMAZING and I wanted to play it for YEARS. It made that union of man and game so much more meaningful
Damn, now I feel really bad for you.. My dad bought doom almost immediately, had multiple computers to run it, and I was practically raised on it, playing deathmatches and coopertive games with my dad and/or sister when I was 5, and already mastering the game and repeatedly playing "Go 2 it" on nightmare mode with godmode on just make all the monsters fight each other and watch the spectacle when I was 7.
Even now I still make massive great fun doom mods and play doom at least 2-infinite times a week.
I guess you could say I was a DOOMED child.
hey, godmode does not work on nightmare, wtf?
Godmode on nightmare isnt possible 🤔
I get into PC gaming just for Doom. I sold my Sega clone called "Songa" and bought a 486 DX4 just to play it. And when you described what you felt the first time playing Doom, it was like I was talking. Amazing video!
And where is that?
Pretty logical, I live in Argentina :D
parabems!
nunca ouvi falar.
Thanks for the video. Although I was a Pc owner from the start, we weren't able to get one up until 1989 since up until then Romania was sealed off from the West in the so called Eastern Bloc. I played a few games up until Doom, like Commander Keen and Dune (my all time favorite adventure/so much more game from that era), I will never forget the first time I fired that shotgun in Doom. I am going to be 30 years old in July and had a few PC and laptop changes over the year, but one thing was always constant: Doom and various mods and wads on whatever system I had. It is the single best shooter that exists, even in this modern era, in which I can't stand most shooters and go with games like Amnesia or SOMA. But if I want to shoot something up, it's DOOM DOOM and DOOM, although with Brutal Doom or Project Brutality/Russian Overkill modifiers. Again, thanks for the video, sorry for the long comment.
+Sophy BJJ Doom for life...
Oh no here we go again, doomers drool again about how this is the only shooter that make them tick and about how modern shooters are the most despicable thing ever. You guys are the tolkienians of the video game world, every fantasy book that is written after tolkien is always not tolkien therefore treated with contempt right away without a .modicum of discernment
I discovered doom when i was 20 in 1995. I tought i had enough of vidéo games at that time, I thought I had seen everything, I thought everything had already been done.
I was wrong
Me too, mate
I truly, madly, deeply understand you my friend. I played Doom until late 96...
I dreamt of playing Doom for years and being teased all the time with magazine screenshots and TV shows. When I finally played it, it was nearly a religious experience XD
Doom is amazing. Despite me playing it late, hell, even finding out about it for the first time in the late 2000s, it still gives me those nostalgic chills and the warm feeling of exploding guts every time I see it. Never having played any non-star wars shooter games until 2008 only makes this stranger.
Damn, my first game was Mario Sunshine on its release after all. Was the best 6th birthday.
IDDQD
IDKFA IDCLIP
IDSPISPOPD
IDFA
Michael A Boerlage IDCLEV
IDBEHOLD
Great video and lots of nostalgia! I totally went gaga over Doom Pc during the craze (in fact i nearly got a 32x for it) and wanted my fix on console since they were the only machines we had. I loved zero tolerance at the time despite being utter utter shit now. Thank god i got to play Exhumed and Duke Nukem on the Saturn
Can't imagine playing Doom without sound. The sound effects and music are such a huge part of its charm.
I love how after watching all those other games, Doom's graphics look really good.
In the early 90ies we all had Amigas and used them a alot, but with the appearance of 386 and 486 PCs we instantly knew that our Amigas were history.
What's super interesting to me, as a 'murican is hearing the differences between our quest to have PC's that could run doom WELL enough vs the entirely different but utterly similar situation of trying to find a console to run on it. Ironically in my own case my first FULL playthrough of doom occurred not on my 386/16 that I'd tweaked to run 24mhz but actually was on the SNES! HAH. Just one of those shared cultural experiences my kids will never understand when they get older. Thanks for sharing yours.
In 1997, I played Doom on a PS1 and using a link cable at a friend's house. Sometimes, I miss those days, but taking a console with a copy of the game, a link cable and a CRT across the other end of the city was a tedious task when your household didn't have a car at the time.
0:38 I CAN'T WAIT for you to go over that episode!!!!! just want to hear the kids review the game
1993, the main reason I purchased my very first PC, a Gateway 486DX 66 with a 424 MB HD, was to play Wolfenstein and then Spear of Destiny. I played so much Quake II online that I actually booked off sick from work to do so. Those were some real fun, exciting times.
Interesting fact for the game at 4:00. Every wall texture is symmetric horizontally if you notice. I was reading an interview from the programmer somewhere and it was mentioned, they software render upper half of the walls and then with hardware trick they mirror the other half. Nifty trick and works with alien textures for a space game :)
I still play Doom about once a week. I use the Zandronum engine and play it online with some friends. It is the game I've played the most by far.
I still play DooM with all the available ports all these years. It still excites me
Watching this video made me feel eternally blessed for having a 486 computer
2018 and I'm still playing Doom, got GTA5, got Overwatch (the list goes on) but there's something about old school Doom that never gets old to me.
There's one thing notice from your video, you done very well for Christmases and birthdays
Very good video as always :) May i suggest you also make one for the doom clones that have appeared on 8bit machines, like the ZX spectrum port ( which is unbelievable! ), commodore port, etc!
+Greg Lyris Yep. Already on my mental line up :D
Very well done video :)
This was such an interesting video to watch. I was lucky enough to have a brother who was into PCs 2 years after Doom released. Doom, Warcraft and Diablo were my lifeblood back in the day. I live in the Philippines and I'm pretty sure no one knew what I was on about when I scribbled the names of these games on my pad paper in school at the time.
There was a huge surge in 486 machines between 92 and 94 in Germany, due to the likes of Vobis and Escom. In just a few years, we've all had swapped our 64s, Amigas and STs for PC boxes. Good times!
Enjoyed that, thanks. My introduction to Doom was on the Apple Performa 630 in 1994 BUT, no sooner had our [Mac users] prayers been answered and we got Doom on the Mac than Bungie’s ‘Marathon’ came along and blew it out the water! Ahhh, good times.
Marathon trilogy games are amazing to play even today
And now, you can HAVE Doom on your ZX Spectrum :D
New machines for Christmas AND your Birthday, spoiled :P
Another great video, thanks again.
I like your style ;) keep up the creativity, curious what more neat history stories are here to find on the channel.
I'm really happy for you that you can access your childhood glee so easily today.
I spend a considerable part of my monthly income trying to recreate it, but it's always out of reach...
I had a 386DX/40mhz running Doom in '93. I try to tell people what Doom did to the FPS/PC scene and they just simply don't understand. Doom holds a special place in my heart!
As a brazilian, I'm shocked that you guys up there didn't have easy access to IBM PCs. I remember playing Doom around January 1994, though I was lucky to live in the third biggest city here, and to have relatives that worked with computing. Doom was the first time I saw a first person shooter as well, though I always imagined what it'd be like to explore all the unreachable places in my Master System games.
Also, it was set to DM mode, between a Pentium and a 486 if I recall it correctly (maybe a 386 and a 486? one of those was really laggy). My mother's cousins were blasting each other on their computers and I was just standing there shocked by the whole thing, waiting for my turn to play Super Mario World or some shit on the other room.
After that I'd go to their house all the time to play Doom, then Heretic, then I finally got my PC, when my uncle brought me Duke Nukem 3D. Even with Duke 3D in hand, though, I'd still rather play some Doom, which was less advanced, but much more fun.
This is definitely one of your better videos man. Kudos.
I remember back in the early 90's that at our Secondary school, the computer labs had 286's for the 9th form and above and the teacher had his lone 386 DX with a one speed caddy-loading CD drive which he use to play Doom on during Lunch break. His gaming antics went unnoticed because he timed his playing to coincide with the daily task of running several Dot Matrix printers and the deafening noise they produced. Hence why it was done during at that time, as it was to disruptive, as the noise could be heard several classrooms away. Fun times.
Oh GLOOM!!! so good! :) Great Video - totally there with you on DOOM!!...I have in on every retro console I own... SNES, Saturn, GBA, GB Micro, Pimped up Amiga A1200 with 040, CD32 with 030,.
I used to be pretty contemptuous of Doom clones, but then again I was spoiled by being too young to remember when a IBM PC was beyond my dad's budget. (He was always the one obtaining cool computer games, mom couldn't care less.) I really appreciated this fascinating peek into all the lengths people went to get their Doom fix before the game was easily obtainable.
Wow so many clones I didn't know. You sir gain my subs. Congrats!
2 years late to the party, but I LOVED Zero Tolerance for the Genesis! I too was hunting for a machine that could play Doom, but ZT actually turned out to be more fun. The game is WAY longer than you would think, and the levels are interesting and fun to play.
I'm England based, and extremely lucky that my dad worked in the PC business, tbf you're slightly incorrect about us UK'ers not getting decent PC hardware, my dad used to build them and sell them, we had a pretty bitchen DX266 486 machine so I had doom pretty much when it came out. It is indeed a masterpiece and remains my favourite game of all time.
That's exactly my story, 1996(instead of 1995), the year when I got my PC and my shareware version of Doom 93, the disc. Still own that till date
Quake was the shooter that hooked me. My first foray with Doom and FPS games was on the 32X till I got a PC and Dark Forces. From there I learned about Quake and Duke3d, two games that would cement my desire to play them.
Quake was my first real online multiplayer experience. It was exhilarating and at the time felt like magic that I could play this game against other people so far away.
I remember the first time I saw them. I was blown away. I'm always blown away when I play it never seems to get old. Sometimes today's games are almost too realistic.
It was very interesting to hear, that by the time you got the third or fourth expensive computer system for your birthday, most of us had not seen a real computer in Eastern Europe. :(
Oh man! This brings back to many memories from back then..
That's very creative what you did there for your end-card selection!
December 1994, the best doom clone(and 3 game series) was released. Bungies Marathon. It had "shotgun, melee" all those years ago.
About how much was the PC you got when you got it back then? How much were some of the other systems you got?
And now I got a home brew Doom clone on my 3DS, its amazing what they can make it working on. This also includes graphing calculators.
I almost died from sun poisoning working on a farm to buy a Jaguar and AvP. Severe second degree sunburn that left me raw and bloody, coupled with a newly discovered and quite severe alergy to hay that added hives and swollen face to top it off... But the reward was soooooo sweet. Till I realized that AvP was technically god like and licked windows in terms of delivering on gameplay even equal to Wolfenstein... But since it was still the first FPS I had ever experienced, I was spared the realization till well after I had a very fond foundation of memories for it.
To this day, it is still the best AvP ANYTHING ever made and possibly my most desired reboot I wish for.
I remember almost switching back to Win 95 from Windows 98, because Doom at the time would not run on it. Nowadays, I still veg out on Doom at least a few times a month. Mostly on my Raspberry Pi.
Everytime i pick up a shotgun in an FPS game now, i expect it to be a pump action to go along with the episode 1 level 1 background music from doom that will no doubt be stuck in my head. Many FPS shotguns have disappointed me over the decades. None make you feel quite like the badass that Doom 1993 did
I'm with you. I craved any and all doom clones back in the day.
On another note that series of Japanese Windows 3.1/MS-DOS commercials are completely insane.
4:22 That looks like some graphical corruption resulting from console stress or emulator problems...what was it?
Hmmm, interesting, didn't notice it at the time. No idea. I think it was probably emulated footage and so problems with Fusion.
Nostalgia Nerd Ah well, still a good video. Lol
I think I remember this being in the original cart as well - I thought at the time it was from a dusty cartridge ! weird.
What's the music that starts at about 8:40 when talking about fears?
Awesome video really enjoyed learning about all those Doom clones. I hadn't heard of a lot of them.
+Overbound Game Studio Thanks! Some classics out there
I remember when we got the Doom share ware in 93, we had a nice new Packard Bell with 2 megs of ram. My dad the hero went out and bought a 4 meg expansion chip so we could run it, with 2 megs to spare. Deathmatch with a 9600 baud modem was my year...
Have you thought doing a "Not quite doom" clones round up for the PC? We had quite a few back in the day. Games made after Doom, but ran on the Wolfenstein 3D engine, or a derivative thereof. These actually filled a hole in the market too. You had people who really wanted to play Doom, but their PC wasn't quite up to snuff.
1993 The year I looked at my Amiga 2000 and thought ......time for you to go.. So long good friend you have served me well... Now thats delt with, time for DOOM!!!!
Really enjoyed that. I think I was leading a very similar life to you only without the Amigas. I had the shareware version of Wolfenstien on my IBM 386 and only got to play Doom on the snes then the PS1 when it was released. Still a huge fan to this day
am 45 now 😊
Back then: Need a good enough machine to play doom
Now: Need a good enough machine to run doom (4) with ULTRA 120 FPS 4K
7:03 whats the clip from......FOR RESEARCH!
While I love Doom, its funny how much nostalgia plays a role here. All the way through the video I was thinking about how much I miss my Amiga and thinking how much I was Commodore had kept up. Still, whatever your machine of choice - great vid!
Nothing quite compares to the amazement of seeing Doom for the first time.Doom didn't just change gaming forever, it dethroned the Amiga and forced people to recognise the PC as a capable gaming platform.
Happy days, my first PC upgrade was caused by Doom's release. I bought an extra 256kb memory chip for my Trident VGA card along with an extra 512kb memory module and then sweated buckets fitting them myself.
that was ace. doom was so cool back on the old command line DOS machines, who needs an OS when you have Doom .
Something about starting Doom up from a command line made it more authentic. More like the computers you find on the aliens films. Added atmosphere.
I'm a simple man, someone talks about doom, pc speaker, i subscribe.
You sure had a lot of great Christmas and birthday presents.
Aah, I remember playing Death Mask on my poor old A500 because the Doom was out of my reach too at that point. A few months later my good friend got a brand spanking new and shiny 486 IBM PC, we never played Death Mask again. It was time for Doom!
6:17 thats indeed a bloody gingerbread man! hahahaha!! this brought back good memories! thank you
Did you guys not have Blockbuster or was it gray area to rent games in the UK...I honestly dont know. I rented Zero Tolerance from Blockbuster around the time it released. I loved it despute its technical issues. I lived that you coukd keep shooting people and aliens, making the fly back. I have never heard of the other game, it sounds awesome.
A question about the Atari ST, could they be upgraded? Could you say add those chips or perhaps (more likely...maybe) chamge the mobo on it?
worked at a BT technology training centre around '94 & although there were tons of different computers, touch screens, video disk machines, even satellite tv nothing was capable of running Doom. just before I moved on in '95 we got 8 new Dell computers with networking which effectively did me out of a job. even though by that point I had a PS1 & Doom alongside I couldn't resist putting Doom on the Dell pc's as a parting gift. hope whoever used those machines enjoyed playing Doom instead of dumb work 😊
Brings me back... A friend showed me the world of DOOM. He even made me a copy of the floppy disks but the two PCs in my house were old or not powerful enough. I had a IBM AT 286 with EGA graphics and my Father's computer was a 486 with VGA but only 2MB of RAM. So I just played Wolfenstine 3D. Didn't get a chance to play DOOM until early 1996 when dear old dad upgraded the memory in his 486 to 16MB but he also tossed on Windows 95. Also at that time I didn't have the floppies anymore but got a box set of Ultimate DOOM and DOOM 2 for Christmas. However this had a Windows 95 port (DOOM95) to the game and ran damn awful because it wanted a Pentium. Didn't find out the CD had the DOS port until a year after I got a decent Pentium II based system.
My mate showed me Doom on his PC in the dark on release. "I've got a game that's right up your boulevard" I remember him saying. OMFG. I was shit scared from the first second. But when the mesh cover of his large floor-standing fan decided to detach and catch the blades all fucking hell broke loose. I will take that memory to the grave. That night spelled the end for my Amiga 1200 and I went to PC, but not before trying to fool myself that Gloom and AB3D would be equals.
Funny now I run the full version on the RPi.
I think the Amiga did a pretty good job with it's Doom clones all things considered even getting a port of Doom years later. Zero Tolerance is also really underrated.
did they ever release a graphics accelerator for the Atari or Amiga?
I was really waiting for Alien Breed on the Amiga, only to be surprised to the max how bad that game has aged!! In my memories it really looked a whole lot better. As far as I can remember the gameplay was at least decent. Great review, liked to hear the story from your perspective. I'm glad Doom was able to impress you, after all those years and games in between lol
You review old computer & gaming tech and you're a Doom fan?
+Subbed! Doom is my all time favourite. The day I got home and heard my dad say "The shareware's finished downloading!" was one of the greatest gaming moments ever. I miss co-oping and DMing with him. :D
Wow your video brought back memories. I forgot about Bad Influence with Andy Crane (formerly of BBC's broom cupboard) and Violet Berlin.
I was a little too young to remember the Doom launch ( I was probably playing Mario paint or Final Fantasy 2), but the first time I played the demo for Quake 2 in 1998 on my Gateway PC, I was forever hooked on first person shooters. Doom,Hexen, duke nukem, Half-life, alien vs predator on jaguar and one of my personal favorites, Escape from Monster Manor on the 3DO
That was pretty much my reaction in 1993. I actually built a 486DX2 from old terminals in '94ish to play Doom and Doom2.
Never say never when it comes to the Genesis, apparently there is a working version of Wolfenstein running on a stock Genesis. I often wondered it the Sega CD could have run a version of Doom. It had rotation and sprite scalling with tons of memory (for its time).
Ahhhh really enjoyed this trip down digital memory lane