Doom the Way It Was Meant to Be Played – v1.1 Multi-Monitor [video] | Hacker News Reader

Doom the Way It Was Meant to Be Played – v1.1 Multi-Monitor [video]

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464 pointsgraderjs178 comments

Back when multi-player doom was a thing, as mentioned in the video it was IPX networking, so to play over the internet we had to tunnel IPX over TCP/IP, using a tool called kali.

Worked surprisingly well given the network speeds we had (28.8k modems)

Kali! I haven’t heard that name in a long time. I used it to play many hours of Warcraft 2 and Command & Conquer with friends - what a great enabling technology for its day.

Descent and Descent 2 deathmatch were awesome on Kali back in the day.

Loved playing them deathmatch, the 3 dimensional aspect made them loads of fun!

Yeah there was something special there that I haven't seen happen in games ever since then. The full 6 degrees of freedom was disorienting at first but extremely fun once you got the hang of it.

Yeah the 6d was crazy to get used to. I sometimes wonder if that's why I had pretty good VR legs from the get go with the OG vive.

descent multiplayer was so good. I loved seeing ships chasing and shooting at each other all over the map. I don't think any other game quite captures that level of mayhem.

The levels were just wild too. Huge open areas that trick you into thinking you know how they work, and then oops you forgot what's above and below you as people swoop down and blast you mercilessly.

Descent gave me extreme anxiety when it was time to escape the level. Such a well constructed game.

Every level in Descent 2 was nonstop dread until you took out the damn thief bot!

I played so much Descent on the Kali ladder, and a buddy and I would play 1v1 Descent 2 basically every day after school. The mind games around camera dropping were such a cool mechanic.

It's a shame there's apparently no appetite for that sort of 6DOF game anymore. While the quality increase in graphics, etc, is dumbfounding I also feel games have silo into just a few formats/genres. In particular anything that strays out side of the WSAD paradigm seems doomed to be ignored.

Back when I was playing Descent one of the big tips was to set up key bindings that'd let you strafe in 3 dimensions at once. So instead of WSAD, I'd have Left/Right on Q/A, Forward/Back on W/S, Up/Down on E/D and Roll on R/F. This was a big advantage over the default layout, but was probably too weird for people to try and get used to.

Yeah a flight joystick with a HAT control for sliding/strafing and throttle lever actually worked well in my experience. I'm sure keyboard and mouse would ultimately be faster, but it was fun feeling like you were a fighter pilot with lasers.

I used a joystick as well. The big advantage is I could control all 6DOF simultaneously without moving my fingers. Players who couldn't do that were definitely at a disadvantage when things got really chaotic as the automatic roll feature didn't work particularly well. You could do a 6D circle strafe vs them and tuck into a blind spot where they couldn't get back on aim to you without adjusting roll with a little pause/hitch in their movement.

I used the hat to switch weapons and such.

My friend used roughly the same idea with a trackball, which was probably even better.

Had my kali code hand written on a sheet of paper. Had it for 20+ years before I lost it .

Could also do halo 1 on console via kali

You can still do IPX/SPX through zerotier

I did it with IPX over parallel ... the cable went out the window over to the next dorm room!

My friend’s dad was an HP engineer and had a lot of gear at home, and I think about 5 PCs in various rooms. They were networked with BNC Token Ring. FWIW I still have never met a more sane or satisfying plug mechanism.

His was a Mormon/LDS family so Doom was off the table, but I sure did log a lot of hours playing Star Wars: Dark Forces 2 and Tie Fighter. Good times.

Before that it was the Wacky Wheels on 486 over 14.4, and before that BBS’s.

Around the same time, my city had this free TTY phone IVR interactive fiction. You could dial some like 622, then enter 5 to play a sci-fi RPG over voice, with 0-9 as inputs. There were community features on that as well- it was one of those microcosm Municipal Computing, and much like the Santa Monica City early digital community I there there is a fascinating history of these short-lived, micro-networks and digital spaces that popped up in the 90’s.

Almost all of my digital entertainment in childhood needed a phone line, which were quite expensive and my parents made sure I knew that.

http://www.mckeown.net/PENaddress.html Santa Monica’s system was called PEN. It seems like a microcosm of the last 25 years of the web compressed into a couple of years in a small beach town, on the edge of everything.

I remember IPX over parallel... Actually I don't. I have no idea how we got it working back then in almost pre-internet times.

I buried coax through my backyard to the friend’s house who lived behind me. Ran it under both houses and up through the floors in our rooms. I wonder if the next people to live in my house ever figured out what that extra coax was for…

Wanted to play multiplayer Doom with a friend once. We lugged my PC and monitor to his house and discovered that he had a 25-pin serial port and I only had a cable for 9-pin. Fortunately he had a box of adapters and we were able to make a “cable” completely out of adapters. We stacked up books and junk under our computers until our the serial ports were at the same height then carefully pushed them together, back-to-back, with the adapters sandwiched between.

I spent a lot of time packing my parents computer into my front passenger seat to haul it to a friend's house to play Doom - with a 30 foot cable so we could be in different rooms!

> Worked surprisingly well given the network speeds we had (28.8k modems)

Poor bandwidth, but good latency.

This reminded me of my first networked gameplay: Super Maze Wars (1993)

I believe it ran over AppleTalk. Anyone knowledgeable on the difference between Kali and AppleTalk? I played a fair bit of Diablo over Kali. (Ears, anyone?)

I remember playing Diablo over IPX over a phone line with my neighbor in the dorms which was especially silly because it was 2005.

Kali was great, I also remember using ten.net on duke nukem 3D release was a blast. Especially with the “K” trick to see other people screens remotely!

Why wasn't the networking in doom just done as TCP/ip (or UDP/IP)?

Doom was from the early 90's. The internet wasn't a common thing, so TCP/IP was not as thoroughly established then as it is now.

In the early 90s IPX/SPX was more common for LANs than the IP stack. It required much less configuration. Managing IP addresses in the days before DHCP was a hassle, while IPX just used MAC addresses directly. It also was just a simpler protocol. This was in the days of DOS where the driver had to run as a TSR the lower 640KiB memory area, so the driver size mattered.

In the later 90s IP pushed it out, partly due to Novel Netware fading away, and partly because IPX didn't scale to large networks the way IP can.

Great response, thank you :)

Googled tsr, terminate and stay resident if anyone else is reading this.

One other question, if a dos game used TCP/ip, would the developer have to write their own ip stack? Presumably dos didn't provide any of this?

Yeah, IP wasn't batteries included in the OS until later. I believe there were a variety of library venders but honestly don't know for certain.

Thanks

Fun fact about doom IPX is 1.0 absolutely spammed the heck out of the network finding peers. Most colleges had big problems days after its release because doom was DDOSing the network. They quickly patched it but patching wasn’t as easy as it is now.

Funny, that's actually how Jay Cotton (co-creator of Kali) learned about Doom and what led him to start exploring the network side of gaming.

There's a decent interview with him that relays the story: https://episodiccontentmag.com/2016/08/26/kali1/

that comment brings smile to my face and tears to my eyes :)))

Because "internet" barely existed at the time doom got out. People played multiplayer games mostly in the same physical room.

Before Kali, in the mid-late 90’s, we had had a 4-node dial-in BBS in my area code (813) called The Arena that ran an app called SerIPX - basically IPX over serial - to allow 4 players to play Doom. It was an incredible experience at the time, especially when paired with Dwango5.wad and other 4-player centric maps. Worked great on a 28.8k modem, direct, with no TCP/IP.

So many memories, but I wish I remembered more from that era. Crazy to think it was a quarter of a century ago.

Yeah, Kali! Best $20 i ever spent. Hard to believe that we used to play Warcraft 2 4vs4 in the late 90s. Somebody always disconnected before the game was over, but still!

I remember running an IPX/TCP gateway from Novell it work flawalessley

It’s finally that moment when something from your “youth” has become a historical curiosity.

My buddies and I rented 4 PCs with network cards and somehow managed to get them all networked together to play Doom 2. Looking back I have no idea how we managed that. I'm sure they all had the right hardware to do everything but I strongly recall that they didn't work as needed "out of the box".

if you really want to feel old, give a good think about how many posters here were born after quake was released.

The moment when you realize you have been using a language longer than it's average user has been alive...

Quake C was formative for me. Good soundtrack too from Reznor.

Or since Counterstrike was initially released.

Yeah, I'm like, why can't you find a 386 or 486 those aren't even that... Oh I guess they are...

I don't want to crawl down the rabbit hole of ancient hardware, but vintage software is so fascinating to me. I wish more of it was in less of a legal grey area. Or even open sourced. The code for so many good amiga products is probably lost forever. I'd love to see the source for vista pro, or the default amiga drawing software.

I got really worried when he pronounced AUTOEXEC as AUTO-E-X-E-C. I realised it's one of those things I rarely, if ever, heard said out loud and so this weird panic came over me that maybe I was saying it wrong all this time.

Luckily, later in the video, he called it AUTO-EXEC (as in an executive). Panic over.

Great video, however you pronounce it.

My jimmies get rustled with people say; AMI as Amy, CLI as cly (rhymes with fly), or /etc as E-T-C....

I heard someone spell out /usr once, still haven’t fully recovered.

EDIT forgot about bin pronounced bine (rhymes with pine)

How about lib? I’ve heard that one commonly pronounced as lib in liberal would be, but one coworker said it like the lib in library would be, which makes more sense but sounds bizarre!

Lib is short for library in every day speech, as well, and pronounced "lib" not "lyb".

What camp do you fall into for Structured Query Language? I'm an SssQueEl purist (it's an acronym not an abbreviation) who bristles when I hear (the far more common) Sequel.

I use it daily and say each letter - everyone else I work with says Sequel.

This all stems from when I originally learnt it 20 odd years ago and read something on the web that proclaimed S-Q-L was correct, and "Sequel" referred specifically to the Microsoft implementation.

(The irony is not lost on me that having started working with MySQL, then Oracle, I've now ended up working daily with SQL Server and so I'm wrong by my own definition, which I probably took as gospel erroneously in the first place!)

Also S.Q.L - but it’s an Initialism, not an Acronym (the latter being pronounceable as words eg NASA).

(Re Doom) To my shame “ID Software” was always I.D not Idd, though! - don’t know how common that was.

ID Software is "Idd" though, isn't it? That was recently confirmed by Tom Hall on Reddit. He came up with the name.

I believe it is. And it's lower case as well!

id Software

Squirrel

That train kind of left the station. With "SQL", you can either try to be correct (and use both in different cases), or to be consistent (and accept you will pronounce some actual product names incorrectly), or — I suppose — to choose chaos (give up, don't care and just choose one at random at any new opportunity).

I think the only possible misstep here is to decide to chide someone else for choosing any of the three paths.

Squill. https://xkcd.com/1989/

S-Q-L, except for products that are pronounced with Sequel (Microsoft SQL server, MySQL, SQlAlchemy, etc.)

I pronounce it Squid Lord

I am trying and failing to find the entry in the jargon file that says something along the lines of "if you come across a person who pronounces 'SQL' as 'squirrel', you have found a true hacker indeed". Maybe it was not the jargon file. It's been many years.

Along those same lines, I also like to pronounce "varchar" in a way[1] that is guaranteed to put a look of disgust on the face of almost everyone in the room; this is how I find my karass.

[1] if anyone replies asking for specifics because they are "genuinely curious" I will slap them. Use your imagination.

It was the jargon file, but it was about SCSI, and that anybody who spelt it out was clueless.

Go ahead and slap me I guess, cuz I must not be imaginative enough.

  vare-care?
  var-car?
  v-archer?
  var-charr?
  varc-har

I don't get it, none of those seem that bad

> "if you come across a person who pronounces 'SQL' as 'squirrel', you have found a true hacker indeed"

Well, I feel oddly validated, thanks. (In the sense of "squirrelly" - counterproductively idiosyncratic or disfunctional.)

> "varchar"

> < vare-care? var-car? v-archer? var-charr? varc-har

"varker" maybe?

If you pronounce it "char" (as in the word for "to storch") instead of "care", you're as bad as the people who say "jif".

Do you mean as awesome as the people who say jif? ;-)

Always as SQL. Historically, SQL was a rename of SEQUEL [1], so there may be some people who say SQL as a word, but most people spell it. That's also how the SQL standard say to pronounce it, "S-Q-L".

But, for Microsoft's WinDbg, the correct pronunciation for those in the know is, "wind bag". [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

Microsoft SEQUEL server and My ESS-QUEUE-ELL. That's how I've always done it and same with all my coworkers even the OG data guys.

> My jimmies get rustled with people say; AMI as Amy

I hate to break it to you, but that's the canonical pronunciation that Amazon uses. You've got an uphill battle ahead of you!

What does Amazon have to do with BIOS firmware!?

Because nowadays the more common interpretation of AMI is Amazon Machine Image.

A lot more people deal with machine images than BIOS these days.

What’s an Amazon Machine Image? Did they take over American Megatrends?

Its like a VMDK or OVA or QCOW2, but Amazon's take on it.

Interesting. I’ve only heard them pronounced as A-M-I or “aa-mee” (with the a as in apple rather than as in aim), including with some friends who work at Amazon.

Yeah, I was thinking ah-me. Just not A-M-I.

How do you say "CLI"? I've only ever heard it as "rhymes with fly", though maybe someone has spelled it out once or twice ("see ell eye").

see ell eye. If I heard "cly", I wouldn't have known what they were talking about until this thread.

I did not realize humans existed who ever attempted to pronounce it.

Now mix in other language speakers pronouncing the English acronyms but while speaking their language.

Ask a German speaker to say CLI. Probably comes out something like "clee". With the C like in "corn". C makes that hard German K sound.

Depends on where in Germany. In the west most pronounce it like K. Like the the word China is pronounce Kina with a hard K. In east and north it is pronounced like a german sch like Schina. The c together with a k like in „backen“ or „lecker“ just sounds like a second „k“ („lek-ker“)

I and my colleagues all pronounce CLI the English way btw. But growing up I had a hard time with the word „cache“. I pronounced it the German way which sounded very silly.

What's wrong with a "Kesch" (er)? :)

OH you mean a "Kache" (l)?

On a related note I find both "Kina" and "Schina" sound weird. It's "China". Like in "ich".

Yes I pronounced it „Kache“. Didn‘t know better ;)

Actually it's french. Therefore "Kaschee". Nix mit Käsch inne Täsch :-)

Similar thing with Budget. Up to this day my toenails roll up when I hear it pronounced like "Badd(dj/g)ätt" instead of "Bü(dj/g)ee".

how do you talk (like actual voice not text exchange) about it otherwise?

I spell it out every time. "The C-L-I flag does foo"

In U.K. I think pretty much everyone spells it.

I've never ever heard CLI pronounced as a word but always as an acronym spelled, "see ell eye". Pronouncing as a word seems odd, like pronouncing PII as pie or IPX as epic.

I hear it a lot in sentences like "Is there a 'kly' command for it or do you have to use the 'gooey'?"

If you are saying it a lot, you pretty quickly adjust to saying a 1-syllable word, instead of saying 3 syllables, whatever your moral stance is. :)

Plus, why should "GUI" get a pronunciation but "CLI" be neglected?

> Plus, why should "GUI" get a pronunciation but "CLI" be neglected?

It's probably because the person who made the acronym or initialism had wanted it to be pronounced a certain way and chose a sequence of letters to achieve the desired result. Of course, the speakers of the letter-group will later decide when and how they will pronounce it!

  Acronym: a word formed from the initial letters
  or groups of letters of words in a set phrase or
  series of words and pronounced as a separate word [1]

  Initialism: a set of initials representing a name,
  organization, or the like, with each letter
  pronounced separately [2]

[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/acronym

[2] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/initialism

In the mid-90s, there was some controversy/discussion over how to verbalize "WWW". Very unwieldy in its spelled-out 9-syllable form! So one of my coworkers proposed "dub-three" - two syllables - so sorry it never caught on.

In my experience, non-native english speakers pronounce it as "klee". But IBM is just I-B-M (because you cannot actually pronounce it like a word). In general, if the acronym can be pronounced like a word, non-native english speakers will do so. More examples of acronyms that are pronounced like words: AMI, GUI, BIOS, ios, RAID, ROM, RAM, DIMM.

Luckily everyone around me says E-T-C, none of those "etcetera" weirdos.. :-)

I always say "ett-cee".

You just blew my mind, is that the source of the name Etsy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etsy

"Kalin said that he named the site Etsy because he "wanted a nonsense word because I wanted to build the brand from scratch. I was watching Fellini's 8 ½ and writing down what I was hearing. In Italian, you say etsi a lot. It means 'oh, yes' (actually it's "eh, si"). And in Latin and French, it means 'what if'."[43][44] In Greek, Etsy means "just because"."

In French, the T would have to be silent to be Et si, so it's not that word. There's nothing in French called ett-çi.

"ett-cee f-stab" may be my favorite vocalization of sys-admining.

f-stab... not f-ess-tab?

It’s f-stab for sure.

But it heats up more with Linux or gif.

My head almost exploded when I heard Linus Torvalds say "ioctl".

("ayoctal", but with a Finnish accent.)

Et-k

I've always called it et-cet but never really needed to utter it out loud very often. kinda just a shortening of et cetera.

numpy, clearly rhymes with lumpy :-)

‘numpty’ - it has an invisible t, the opposite of a silent t.

Here's another...

one of my co-workers says yer'll for URL. Ugh.

This is common in other languages. Pronouncing letters in English is especially tedious. "You ar el" is so oppressive to say compared to "oo rr luh" as you might in a Romance language. And both are worse than "uhrl".

Also, we don't got a problem with "bios" for BIOS. :p (Yet few people seem to use "yufi" for UEFI.)

Yufi sounds too much like "Roofie", which is what I call a Yufi that has network connectivity and is hosted on a machine with an appropriate network card.

Friends don't let friends compute on Roofied computers... Or worse, roofie their own systems!

This sounds like Ural to me. Excellent stuff.

Acronyms are actually the devil. In the medical world it’s been further optimised such that one abbreviation can mean many things. And then people ‘handwrite’ (it’s actually just scribbles) half their documentation so that you can’t read it.

If you are lucky enough to work in a service that captures things from diverse specialities the result is dark comedy.

MRA = magnetic resonance angiogram. Or magnetic resonance arthrogram.

CT = computed tomography. Or corneal transplant.

Those are just the two that caused thousands of dollars of errors in my recent memory, but it’s a daily battle working out what the hell a referral means.

Exec as in "execute", as in, "AUTOmatically EXECute these batch commands when DOS starts."

I was referring to the pronunciation, not the meaning - EXE-CUTE isn't quite right compared to EXEC-U-TIVE.

You can also side load the original Doom 1 + 2 wads and play them on the Oculus Quest and it’s as good as you’d imagine

https://sidequestvr.com/app/796/questzdoom

One would like to think that's the first thing Carmak did for Oculus.

They forgot the 5th monitor. We used to use a whole other sun sparcstation running the tiniest, laggiest video with the camera on the other remote user so when you fragged them you could flip them off. Back then, they didn't really have picture in picture or video overlays, so we just used a whole other machine sitting next to us.

I remember playing Doom II over serial cable (null modem).

We tried to copy Duke Nuken 3D over the cable... As far as I remember it would had taken a day or something? We cancled it.

Duke3d over serial worked fine

Copying it over serial worked slow though.

I think I never tried it via serial but remember playing over 10base2 or 10baseT IPX.

Presumably with a utility like interlnk. It would depend on the baud rate you had it set to, 9600 would be typical but you could go much slower. Looks like a 20MB zip, not sure how much expanded but certainly more. At a minimum in ideal settings it would take over 5 hours.

Duke3d was released in 1996. PCs by that point had long included some variation of the 16550A UART and interlnk took advantage of the FIFO in the 16550A. A PC powerful enough to run Duke Nukem 3D should not have had a problem transferring at 115200.

A lot of PCs had issues above about 56k especially if your serial cables weren’t of the highest quality.

I vividly remember when the Duke 3D shareware demo came out and I faked being sick to stay home from middleschool so I could spend over 4 hours downloading all 6 megabytes of it at 9600 baud.

I think we probably copied it via a laplink cable. We definitely played it multiplayer via a serial cable.

the good old days of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake World. trying all kinds of network connection with (hopefully working) db25 printer cables, modems, telnet connections, ethernets, no documentation available, only guessing here and there and some intuition to make a lan to work. 3 hours to make shit to work and 24h playing non stop.

I doubt kids these days would have the same perseverance to make fortnite to work lol

edit: kids downvoted me because of the fortnite anecdote

Null-modem connection? That will be a $20/m in-app purchase.

In app purchases in 1993 involved sending a postcard and check to the developer's home address. Such simpler times.

> I doubt kids these days would have the same perseverance to make fortnite to work lol

You should have seen the effort we put into getting modded Minecraft servers to work properly...

I bet it is around the same percentage of the population setting up the heavily modded servers and setting up doom networks, haha.

Only nerds lol

having participated in both activities, I can concur the frustration was very similar.

I had totally forgotten about this... the pure hell of making LAN stuff work across different versions of windows, with weird routers that wouldn't work, with different network cards, and spending literally HOURS trying to get it to work. These days, it feels much more rare that if you're trying to do something for hours that you will actually succeed, but back then spending 3-4 hours trying to get it working there was still a lot of hope, because you hadn't tried every combination of every single setting/cable yet.

I still remember having to add SPX/IPX to machines to run some game - maybe StarCraft.

Today I really have some nostalgic feeling about it. when you look back and remember the effort you put to get shit done, the reward and joy were amazing.

There is this spicy touch of having to tug your PC to a LAN party or go rent a movie that makes you enjoy it more.

One way to emulate that nowadays is to pay exhortative cinema prices and not have the itch to surf on your phone due to sink cost fallacy.

Ye ... enumerating the options.

I had the same experience guessing options everywhere until it worked.

I wonder if that was because I was a kid or it was how you did things back then?

When I was a teenager some friends and I would do semi-regular LAN parties. The adage was that it didn’t matter when we started, or how much preparation we’d done ahead of time, we wouldn’t get past the debugging and into gaming until 11pm.

haha, yes. and when things finally worked out, our parents were already tired of the mess and the amount of noisy children wanting us to stop

This is why we’d have them at the house of whoever’s parents were away at the time. I think they appreciated the fact we just gathered and cranked up their electricity bill a bit rather than completely destroying the house. Once we managed to hire a scout hut for the weekend which was the pinnacle.

QuakeWorld had perfect TCP/IP, actually still one of the best netcodes in a game IMO. Reminds me of trying to get coax LANs set up correctly though, and how everyone's ping would spike when someone was leeching files during games.

Most of us downloaded Duke3D over serial (modems)

Shareware version was only 5MB

First time we tried with a regular cable. After many attempts, the computer store explained to us kids the concept of a null modem. We bought one on the spot and it has provided us sooo much fun over the years. Money very well spent.

Serious Sam was as close to Duke Nukem as I got.

This is awesome. I regularly play sims (DCS World, iRacing) on triple screens and would love for more support out there in the titles.

To be specific, by support I mean that you need multi viewport rendering - which is not to be confused with a uber-stretched wide screen rendering (which just looks horrible, most of the time).

The side display rendering will take the monitor angle into consideration and make the viewports look correct from the observer's point of view/head position.

In iRacing we even have hardware support for this in the form of NVIDIA SMP - simultaneous multi-projection; sadly, no other titles support it.

I have no reason to doubt that this is real, and it looks amazing.

But what's with the left monitor's screen overlapping with his face? Looks kinda greenscreen-y: https://youtu.be/q3NQQ7bPf6U?t=2136

Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqOoY-o-j-Q

He does some processing on the area of the footage with the crt's to make them look nicer on video. You can't actually see the screen, it's just a square the same size as the monitor that seems to be making that region darker.

My guess is he was using a filter on a portion of the screen to reduce glare or something like that in post production.

So you're telling me doom was not "meant to be played" in a pregnancy test[1]?

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5NTJSfUWDE

On a related note, there’s a procedurally generated FPS in VR. “Doom of VR”

https://store.steampowered.com/app/615120/COMPOUND/

Doom3 also plays well on a Quest 2

There’s this too https://uploadvr.com/playing-original-doom-vr-quest/

Compound is really fun :) It has become one of the games we have people play to try out VR as it is relatively simple and understandable, but is a really unique, fun environment, too!

That was an enjoyable tangent. I won't if this was meant as a debugging aid originally and thus not well documented (the wiki on it is sparse).

From what I could tell, this feature was removed in 1.2, which was the first version that had the nice menu for setting up multiplayer games.

Maybe it wasn't a compelling enough feature to include in that menu, so it got cut.

He theorises in the video that it was cut from 1.2 due to a change in the networking stack IIRC

Oooh, do Descent next!

https://youtu.be/0RnacEU9-v0

I'm playing Descent through again right now! Pentium II machine with a Logitech Wingman Extreme joystick. It's the side benefits of being old and throwing nothing away.

Sounds like someone's been a bad boy.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181015180144/https://descent.c...

I could've sworn that the copy of Doom on DOS I had back in the 90s supported the monitor angle as a commandline arg. This video says otherwise, but I'll swear black and blue that it was there, and I've never had any special copies of Doom beyond the official (but likely pirated) one.

I remember doing this in college! Hardest problem was balancing 21" monitors on the edge of desks.

I thought it was meant to be played on a Lego brick: https://youtu.be/o76U0JPrMFk

I have to admit that I didn't check every second of the video, but given that the views on the extra screens are rotated +/- 90 degrees to the main view, shouldn't this also be their orientation in the physical setup, with your head in the centre, so that you're immersed with the game world?

You'd think that but somehow the alignment roughly works during gameplay. I don't get how (probably a brain thing) but watching his frag his way through level 1 and 2 didn't look that wrong, and actually made sense. I was checking the flank monitors for enemies, it seemed to work.

Hi, I'm the one in the video. I've had this comment a few times, with CRTs, no way. Your face would probably be 8 inches away from the front tube to fill your peripheral vision and you wouldn't be able to focus on it without getting fatigue for long.

It is possible it was meant for a CAVE VR room projection system, but I think the more likely answer (as there is no rear view) is that it was just a limitation of the engine. There is no system in Doom for rendering only part of the 2D screen offset from the main view (you cannot pan to look up or down as an example). Doom's FOV was 90 degrees for a single view, so they likely just rotated the drone views 90 degrees to render the "adjacent" area of the screen.

Ah yes CAVE VR exactly like that. Not sure if it was the exact thing though

It shouldn't be a limitation to the engine, because they could've either translated to the sides and/or rotated 45 degrees

I remember it being promoted pretty much as this video demonstrates, back when DOOM was new and people were just getting to know the networked options. Some old school video game players were adept at handling weird projection systems and this would not really faze them. Let's be real, DOOM was 2.5D afterall.

Speaking of ID games in a CAVE VR... somewhere in late 1990s to early 2000s, I ran into a caveman who was playing with some kind of hacked up Quake for the CAVE. It had integrated the head tracking, so you really got the full-immersion from being able to duck or peek around corners, etc.

I don't remember whether they really made the weapon aiming work with the full 6 DOF wand tracking, or if it was just a walking simulator.

There used to be places where they had Doom running in something similar to a lightbox (At SARA Amsterdam). The game was basically projected on 3 planes (left, right, front). The box/cube would be something like 2m - 3m cubed, and you would stand in the middle. I've never had the privilege of actual playing. I think this is why the 90 degree angle is in such a way.

So basically a a real-life 3d skybox, if you're familiar with 3d-engine terms [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skybox_(video_games)

surely you can just run three VMs on a ultrawide monitor to get similar multi monitor DOOM experience. :)

if you're going to cheat (read: use anything other than the original version), the newer versions of doom support an fov larger than 90 degrees (aka doom3 + g_fov or via a mod), so you can just run one copy in widescreen (especially on today's 21:9 aspect ratio monitors). (this is touched upon in the video.)

Not the same thing unfortunately. You really need more projections.

This took me so far back! The university computer lab I worked in back the day used to Doom in order to "test" the workstation's (linux and windows) networking.

Start at 27:00 if you value your time

quick link https://youtu.be/q3NQQ7bPf6U?t=1638

It’s very disorienting to watch lol the camera angle combined with the monitor positioning is scrambling my brain a bit. Still very cool.

Doom on a Pentium 4? Seems like a massive overkill

Also can’t believe P4 was just 7 years after the release of Pentium, with Pentium Pro between them.

This feuture must have been for some show right? A room with projectors or whatever. The projections seems to be 90 degrees.

Check this out!

Doom the way it was NOT meant to be played (on blockchain!)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838633

yes, I agree. Doom emacs should be played like that

An absolutely fascinating watch

Flipping pissed they cancelled the DOOM tv show

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