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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.
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.
Interesting. I myself circle strafe through museums so I can concentrate on the exhibits while I move.
If you left your pants on it would be less weird.