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Doom Turns 25: The FPS That Wowed Players, Gummed Up Servers, and Enraged Admins (theregister.co.uk)
On December 10, 1993, after a marathon 30-hour coding session, the developers at id Software uploaded the first finished copy of Doom for download, the game that was to redefine first-person shooter (FPS) genre. Hours later IT admins wanted id's guts for garters. The Register: Doom wasn't the first FPS game, but it was the iPhone of the field -- it took parts from various other products and packaged them together in a fearsomely addictive package. Admins loathed it because it hogged bandwidth for downloading and was designed to allow network deathmatches, so millions of users immediately took up valuable network resources for what seemed a frivolous pursuit to some curmudgeonly BOFHs.
The game was an instant hit -- so much so that within hours of its release admins were banning it from servers to try and cope with the effects of thousands, and then millions of people playing online. It spawned remakes and follow-up games, its own movie (don't bother) and even a glowing endorsement from Bill Gates.
The game was an instant hit -- so much so that within hours of its release admins were banning it from servers to try and cope with the effects of thousands, and then millions of people playing online. It spawned remakes and follow-up games, its own movie (don't bother) and even a glowing endorsement from Bill Gates.
I still tend to go through unfamiliar museums by keeping right and working my way around that way so I do not miss anything. I call that the "Doom Technique" because that's how I would explore various levels in Doom, way back when. Vaguely-related note: I still have the original 3.5" floppy containing its predecessor, Castle Wolfenstein.
TANSTAAFL
Played it.
Over IPX.
With multiple players.
Over a parallel port cable.
I kid you not.
There was an old DOS TSR (that I have never been able to find since) that was a packet driver that operated over either a parallel port or serial port daisy-chain from one machine to the next. Wasn't fast, but it was fast enough. Better than serial alone as you could have several machines connected and it was faster. And everyone had parallel ports - I have no idea if EPP or whatever was an option that long ago, but it was faster than the available serial. And you had several of serial/parallel most likely so you had the ports to daisy-chain.
Back when nobody had network-cards in their machines and kid's budgets didn't run to even 10Base2 to play their games - Oh, but dad! - we improvised. I don't even remember how we found it (no Internet for us back then), or what it was called, but we used that little TSR for an awful lot of things that weren't otherwise possible without a proper network card.
The only bit we bought was an ever-increasing daisy-chain of serial and parallel cables using whatever people had discarded or we could find. To this day, I could literally make any combination of 9/25pin M/F to 9/25pin M/F cable for tens of meters of length just from those old cables in my bits box.
I remember it was a faff with whatever the packet driver was, and then having to load some (Novell?) TSR to allow IPX etc. all in a DOS boot config (we had DOS 5, I think, and 4DOS utilities and a bunch of PC Magazine freeware - AMENU - to make a menu just to load up that config and play networked).
Hell, I even remember playing Quake over the same link, but that was only temporarily as only our friend had another machine powerful enough to run that, and then we upgraded to 10Base2 and then 10BaseT not long after.
But I have gamed IPX over parallel port via DOS. People always thing I got it wrong whenever I say that.
Some good listenin' for the occasion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
When a doom 2 add-ons named Brutal Doom is more fun and way better than the reboot made not long ago, you know you fucked up. hehe. Ok not fucked up but come on, its Bethesda, what did you expect hey.
IDKFA IDDQD.
I can't remember my mom's birthday but I still know those two codes. :-/
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Quake had true 3D levels that can pass over one another. Quake had 3D adversaries. Quake had network gameplay with Quakeworld. Quake had OpenGL support with GLQuake that launched the GPU world, really starting with the Voodoo 1. Quake had translucent water, which was amazing the first time I ever saw it. And lastly, Quake is still the bar that any small platform must aspire to by answering the question, "Does it run Quake."
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Really, it only *seemed* like a frivolous use of network resources? In exactly what way is playing Doom, or any game generally, not *actually* a frivolous pursuit?
Not that I'm opposed to frivolous pursuits, far from it - but if you're making the implied claim that playing a game *isn't* completely frivolous, a little evidence would be appreciated. Or at least a decent argument. Heck, even an anecdote would be a big step up from making such a ridiculous claim completely unsupported.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
crashing our Netware 4.x server one lunch time playing DOOM. The server only ran the whole business. Three of us sitting in his office getting read the riot act. Good times.
What fell the Amiga was clinging to the A500 long after it has passed its prime, and the incompatibility to newer models. Not its 3D-capabilities, or lack thereof. The PCs of the time were not any better at displaying 3D graphics, dedicated 3D cards came much later when 3D actually became a thing.
Furthermore, A500s were sold as "as is", hardwired and hardly upgradeable. You could plug a memory extension into it, you had an "expansion port", where upgrading it with anything cost way more than it was worth and you could basically only use Amiga hardware to do either, much as you do with Apple today (granted, back then this was not so uncommon), but Commodore simply didn't offer anything worthwhile for way too long. When they finally woke up, the ship had already sailed and people were turning towards the PC for gaming because it caught up quickly, sound cards became cheaper and while it was a bit more of a hassle to get the hardware to do what you wanted it to do (the older ones here may remember the worries of setting DMAs, IRQs and IO ranges so they don't conflict between various cards, usually with jumpers that deserved their name mostly for jumping from your fingers into the depths of the case), you at least could get it to do what you wanted it to do.
Amiga still sold the 500 long into the times of 386 and even 486 when VLB graphics cards came out that had more video memory than the A500 had in total. And games for the Amiga were also still built to run on the 500 instead of targeting 3000 and 4000 machines, mostly because of a nonexistent market.
The time simply passed by Amiga. That's all. It fell for the same reason the C64 eventually fell: Technology surpassed it and while it was technically possible to upgrade the A500, few people did and hence few games supported it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
amgia stuck to custom chips to much and os in (non flash) rom
Doom is what got me to buy a Soundblaster back then. It blew me away.
Anyway, John Romero will be releasing 9 new levels to commemorate the 25th anniversary.
by dwarfing economies of scale that were emerging even as the C64 was at full strength. Motorola was taken out the same way. IBM even suffered. There's many others like DEC, Sun, SGI, Atari. Apple all but died under the onslaught. They only survived by filling a gaping hole in music sales that the music exec's still can't get their heads around. The Web enabled Apple to shift out of general computing.
It's a chicken or egg problem. Everyone wants to use the same software. So you can't design hardware for something that isn't the mainstream without it being expensive.
Later on Doom was fully embraced by the BoFH community as an admin tool.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/7923
I remember letting the demo download all night long and overnight on dialup. Was out in the boonies and that was the best we had, but man was it cool when it finally downloaded.
I had the floppy disk shareware version for whatever it was, came on a few floppies.
I think it was that first level or so, but it ran amazingly on my old Pentium 90.
There was an Arts/Rec center up on Custer Hill in Fort Riley, KS that me and several other older guys would book time at to play LAN matches of Doom II a few years later. One of us had a map editor where we made our own levels to fight each other in.
Frivilous? If it was why did we take it so goddamn seriously?
Serial topped out at 115kbs on most PCs, and that's only if you had a decent UART.
EPP/ECP parallel ports could hit 2.5mbs, and were pretty standard by the mid-90s, when Doom came out. There were (relatively slow) Ethernet adapters for parallel ports in the late 90s.
IPX was the most efficient network protocol if you didn't need to leave a LAN, as it wasn't routable without doing some router tricks. Perfect for games, which is why so many supported it. Even after TCP/IP became ubiquitous, you would still often use IPX to hit the file server as it was so much more efficient. Once fast Ethernet, and faster TCP/IP stacks and servers became available, the difficulty of supporting multiple protocols outweighed any benefits IPX could offer.
It looks like he hasn't posted in over a decade.
https://slashdot.org/~John+Car...
Got a tricked-out 486 from Gateway mail order, computers from cow country.
It didn't run Doom. Called their customer service, "We don't consider Doom an essential application to support."
Back it went. I'm sure that attitude changed shortly.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Don't forgot that Doom also gave us:
* Total Conversions or "themed" levels, such as Aliens, Barney, etc. /gamerule keepInventory true
* Mods -- the ability to change core gameplay rules. e.g. Minecraft allows "house rules" such as:
* In-game map which was also awesome. (Looking at you Vermintide 2!)
I'm reminded that the entire FPS genre seems to have regressed. This commentary of FPS map design 1993 vs 2010 succinctly summarizes the problem of how everything has being script / trigger driven. In some games the dam loading screen takes ages (Gran Turismo 6).
It is also pathetic that FPS no longer ship with map editors. Worse, DLCs only come with ~3 maps. Hell, even Age of Empires 2, a 19 year old game STILL has new maps being made. e.g. The "Nothing" theme is currently popular.
And then game devs wonder why no one plays their game after 5 years. /sarcasm But ooh, shiny!
--
Enlightenment, noun and verb; The Journey is more important then the Destination of becoming aware of a higher perspective.
This games release also pushed untold numbers of us to learn what ethernet was, what IPX was, how to configure DOS autoexec.bat and config.sys files to eek out enough memory to play them.
Or even how to perform basic PC hardware maintenance like upgrading video cards, processors, etc .. if not for the fact that we _needed_ to do those things to play the game better than your friend.
My favorite story: Spielberg and Robin Williams were playing deathmatch while Spielberg was filming Schindler's List. Apocrophal or true? Who knows.. Its a great story either way.. Nobody has better gallows humor than nurses working on a cancer ward. The whole conversation about the negative effect of violent games ignores the sometimes healthy part of acting out nightmares as a way of coping with them. But that's not part of my purpose. Or is it?
I remember as an Netware admin, a bunch of us built a Netware server with multiple NIC in it to segment the network, just so the department could play Doom/Quake/Descent on the LAN without noticeably slowing down the office.
This was of course in the day before "every port is a switch, every port is it's own collision domain".
Nothing like going down a corridor blasting purple dinosaurs that are "singing" "I love you, you love me..."
Best Slashdot Co
Was just released: http://fabiensanglard.net/gebb...
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
The C128 did have extra text/graphics modes. It supported 80 columns in c128 mode
It's the truth. The old Workbench 1.2 easter egg "We made Amiga, they fucked it up" was the story of Commodore's ownership of Amiga pretty much.
FC Closer
It spawned remakes and follow-up games, its own movie (don't bother)
Was I the only that actually enjoyed the FPS sequence in the Doom movie? The rest of the movie was "meh" though.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The reason the first versions of DOOM brought down networks was its use of broadcast packets, it was patched out in later versions.
Those packets would repeat across routers to other locations over wan links and more, total network mayhem back then. I dont recall the game using any special amount of bandwidth at all beyond the broadcast packet problem.
Once it was patched it was mostly benign on a local segment.
When I was in the USAF, I a couple of my buddies playing on the Air Force network. I told them, "What is the LAN shop gonna say when they catch you playing Doom on the USAF network?" They looked at me and said, "Who do you think we are playing?"
Later, I spent my last six weeks in the USAF playing Doom and "using" my brand new $5,000 workstation (Pentium 90, 32 MB of memory, 1 GB HD, 21" monitor) to keep it out of the hands of other projects... on order from my Lieutenant! I also used Borland C++ to write a program that told me how much time, down to the microsecond, I had left in the USAF!
The Engineers probably could had made a better system. But in 1993 you will need to fight off the momentum that Microsoft had, with its army of IBM and IBM Compatible PC's all running MS DOS and Windows 3.1x. With the 386 and 486 chips there was a set of 32bit systems that a middle class family could afford.
Yes Amiga could had made a better system, but all the software was for PC's. During that time you had to go to the Store and buy box copies of software, order copies over the mail, (much lower case shifting my eyes around) copping the floppies from a friend, or waiting hours to download the program from your local BBS.
If you were an Amiga user, the stores may have a shelf for you, and perhaps if you were lucky a BBS will have Amiga software, but for the most part you will need to hunt down to find software for it.
The Store has mostly PC products, a corner for Apple and Mac, and just a shelf for others.
The only way the Amiga system would had succeeded would had cause Amiga to die sooner. By having an army of Amiga compatible systems for sale like there was for the IBM PC market. This hurt IBM but Microsoft was the real winner there.
Doom was the first game to fully utilize the power of the 386 and 486 PCs and showcased what the new 32bit systems could do compared to the old 8 and 16 bit consoles. Doom didn't target Amiga, it hit the console market, hurting the likes of Nintendo and Sega. Having a fast moving game with top graphics and 3d perspective.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My friend and I loved that game (and eventually Doom II); we'd mail each other maps on floppy disks as he lived on the other side of the country. We even deathmatched each other over the phone lines to the tune of $10/hour, up until we were flat broke.
;)
When he came in to visit family, I rented a computer for him ($50/day!), hacked up an AT modem initialization string that required no dial tone, and ran a null phone line from one machine to the other so we could play. That was so much fun.
I read a book on DOS batch scripting then and wrote a program that would lock his computer up on his birthday and display a greeting; I hid it in one of the new map installers I had sent to him.
It linked processes to monsters, so kill a monster means kill a process. I think the cpu usage determined monster speed as well, but can't recall.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Then Orcs can storm your ship, or you can storm the space dredger filled with them. Not sure which would be the more fun.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Anyone else remember running Laplink on a Null-printer cable to link two PCs together? I remember using it for Terminal Velocity and Wing Commander Armada. Way back in like 1996/1997.
All praise to the Johns. Romero the design rock god that wanted to "make you his b*tch" and Carmack the programming god who could solve any problem in weekend.
Carmack has never stopped trying to bring a virtual experience to the masses, even today at Oculus.
Me and my friends had countless LAN parties when ID brought us LAN play. Staying up all night to heavy metal, mortal Kombat, and DOOM!
Publishing the tools to allow mod making really set ID apart.
The shareware idea of giving part of the game for free coupled with the gore and rock made Doom legendary overnight.
It's a shame the Johns had to split ways and crash. A game needs both design and innovation.
Quake was truly 3D awe-inspiring, but DOOM was ground breaking with such tight optimizations for fast 3D and nutty level designs.
When you beat the first mission and it simply ends in being curb stomped by a horde of demons.
It's on every platform, in every game store, hell I home brewed an ipod with a buddy to play Doom with a scroll wheel.
Download now and play it tonight on your Xbox or Ubuntu. I know I will.
PCs were immortal, that's why it was successful (and why it was a terrible mistake for IBM). Thousands of PC builders and hundreds of component manufactures failed in the 80's and 90's. A PC company fails, two pop up to replace it. Commodore, Atari, and others were just one company holding together an architecture, they didn't have the luxury of failing.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
C128 was designed around the perceived needs of business users. But Commodore was a gaming platform first and business users weren't really flocking to it. I guess if it were only about technology and price a C128 (1985) was cheaper than a an IBM PC AT (1984), but horribly inadequate in comparison when it came to running business software.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
We built a COMring cable, which let you run a token-ring like network over a specially constructed serial cable or over a null modem cable (if you only have 2 nodes). Then installed an IPX packet driver in order to run the game. at 57.6k and decent UARTs (16550) it played fine.
For parallel we ran LapLink cables, a type of parallel cable like you described. And transferred files with LANtastic or Laplink. Eventually a few people got 10Base2 cards and would act as gateways for those of us without network cards.
Lots of co-op games of Heretic were done our little improvised network.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
IDKFA
IDSPISPOPD
IDBEHOLD
ok, it's been to long, I cant remember any more. Do I get to keep my nerd card?
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
The size of the Doom download had nothing to do with the network issue that early versions of Doom caused.
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Broa...
FC Closer
Just what I thought when I read this. Doom was released when people had dialup if they were lucky. You got Doom by getting the demo on the cover disk of a magazine.
-- Kernel Panic: Error reading
The 500 was intended to be a cost reduced version, except that the stuff you gave up really wasn't worth the smaller cost. But remember that Apple made similar mistakes, not wanting upgradeability early on (similar to the NeXT).
I liked the Amiga 1000 best. It didn't look boxy like PCs or the A2000, and didn't look like a C64 or Apple II like the 500 did. I did get the A2000 later for more upgradeability and a hard drive. I do remember some major developers not wanting the hard drive and instead got more RAM and created a RAM-disk to really speed things up.
We were lucky in Silicon Valley, there was a store there that was essentially dedicated to the Amiga. (It's a KFC now)
Doom and Quake required VGA. You are jumping all over in history. We could say, truthfully, that the Amiga plugged into a tv set. It did, for a time.
Being a cluster of ASICs is what did the Amiga in. It allowed enhanced in the early period, but could never, ever scale when the megahertz wars began. Then, the architecture had to move to the same commodity chips as everything else. A bunch of ASIC chips with girls' names couldn't just double in speed over and over.
The Doom installer fit on a few floppy diskettes. You downloaded it.
Or one could say, unluckily drawn into a cul-de-sac subculture.
Commodore, Atari, etc. had to depend on there always being department stores to sell their plastic cased consumer appliances into. The PC market had morphed into mom and pop shops selling cheap clone hardware out of storefronts.
Not just selling them. But building them up from components. The PC market grew organically from a cottage industry of PC clones. People who cloned other hardware, like Apple //e had a much harder time because not everything was off-the-shelf from component suppliers. Making an Amiga clone would be really hard for example, because of the rather complicated custom set of chips for it. A crappy little PC clone with CGA was a bunch of chips out of a catalog from Intel and Motorola.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I would contend that almost none of the crappy PC clones had CGA cards. Things went Hercules pretty quickly, and then EGA. The CGA was an early phenomenon.
The PC clone was indeed made up out of catalog parts. Not even in a way that makes complete sense. The 8250 wasn't the best choice for a serial interface. And there was very little from Motorola aside from the 6845 CRT controller.
CGA was pretty common in a narrow range of years of the 1980's because it could output to a TV and users could skip buying a monitor. EGA ended up being big during the 286 era, but in terms of units didn't really sell that many. Budget machines (8088 and 8086) were shipping with CGA cards, including "SuperCGA" that provides some non-standard additional set of modes. Hercules was very popular for budget conscious people who wanted good text mode performance. The graphics of HGC was a novelty but usually not crucial for most users. (I liked it though!)
MC6845 CRTC was the heart of MDA, HGC, CGA and by extension EGA and VGA. That weird little chip was quite influential. Probably the only Motorola part.
As for 8250, it was only slightly worse than other options. I take a bigger issue with the decision to use the 8237 DMAC, it was a horrible DMA controller. But it's all Intel had in stock at the time. ISA was also an abomination. Lots of things about the PC were things that were not very forward thinking. Yet here we are, building super computing clusters out of their descendants.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
there was nothing wrong with the 500, it fit the market it servered perfectly.
besides some extra ram and an extra floppy drive almost nobody needed to expand their 500 for what they were doing with it.
the price difference between the 500 and the 2000 was huge, the amiga wouldn't have been as popular as it had been if it wasn't for the 500.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
forget about doom, all my amiga friends were already converted to pc by the time doom came out.
you had stuff like wing commander, which ran like a dog and looked terrible on amiga, but on pc it was awesome (if you had at least a 386 with vga).
there were others too, like ultima underworld, alone in the dark, not to mention that you almost had a (small) hard disk on pc, which made certain games better to play, lucasarts and sierra online adventure in particular. also don't forget Doom's daddy - wolfenstein!
all these came before doom and were slowly but steadily moving people away from amiga to pc.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I think Doom is partly what got me really interested in computers, and Quake got me into networking; I was a tech servicing consumer electronics before that (VCRs mostly) but I got bit hard by the computer bug in '94. I had a TI-99 in the early '80s, but it just didn't hold my interest; DOS/Win3.11 were so different.
Much of the appeal of the id games for me was the ability to bring down the console or use the conf files to tweak graphic and network settings, and experiment with the changes, seeing the effects firsthand. Then, there was the advent of the Internet.
Those were magical days.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Ah yes, I remember those days, we ran the SGI OpenGL version of Doom, you had to download the WAD file to run it, but it ran the whole game and of course Multiplayer DOOM, sound and all. We had 4 Workstations in the Lab all networked together on a fast network, and every night starting around 10PM, we would stop working / or working on thesis and then play Deathmatch for 4-5 hours. This went on for several months. There was nothing like it and nothing like trying to be on the top. I would dream at night of what it would be like 10-15 years in the future, but wow the graphics today in FPS and Multiplayer games is just amazing. I wonder what it would be like 20 years from now.
We all went on to be successful people in the computer industry.
Who had LANs back then? Companies, universities.
Guess who was banning Doom?
It wasn't the download that really broke networks it was the sub-optimal network code in the game that flooded the network and made it unusable for anything else. That's why it got banned.
You're calling this guy a kid but demonstrating your own senility. Try educating yourself.