Also, today is the 30-year anniversary of DOOM's release.
Some of us were lucky enough to have a 386 and if we squished the screen down far enough we could get a reasonable framerate. Some of us were lucky enough to have mates with a 386. I was particularly lucky in that my mates dad had a small pc store in his shed. So we also had a laplink cable for transferring software and a serial cable for multiplayer gaming.
Again, it was magic.
Edit: without wanting to sound too “get off my lawn”. I was loading up some games on a tablet for a flight with the kids today and they just don’t care that much. They could get a new game at any moment. For us a new game was a rarity. If one of us got a new game from somewhere we’d bmx over to our mates so they could copy it. I recall a friend getting the quake demo and zipping it on to 8 disks for me, the 6th of which was corrupt. It took a week of back and forth before I finally got to play it.
Back then a cousin and I found a cheat exe on some BBS that gave you infinite ammo in Doom 2, it also gave us a virus (Michaelangelo, I think?). My dad somehow disassembled the exe to remove the virus so we could keep our infinite ammo cheat. I'm spoiled - I would struggle to do the same without online resources.
Got it right!
Back then cheat codes were hard to find, especially if you found doom on shareware floppies and didn’t have BBS access to the DooM FAQ.
And a couple of years later we had dlh.net
It was not a playable experience. Even at the smallest screen size, it still ran at about 1 FPS.
But, I was playing Doom!
I do not miss the nonsense with unreliable media, however. Loading Elite from tape took five minutes and if humidity or temperature were unusual or the moon occluded Santraginus or whatever it'd be spewing endless CRC check errors. Some hardships are valuable learning experiences, but this one is just trauma.
My point sort of drifted off into nostalgia a little, but I think there was something in the scarcity of it back then - probably helped somewhat by growing up in rural NZ.
Did you manage to find something ?
If you were to find it today, it'd probably have to be an indie game. It's a bit of a jump, but if you like exploring alone you could try Scanner Sombre.
well, With Quake not really :) It’s hard to explain why. I’ve seen nothing as satisfactory as shotgun in Doom. ;) More realistic - yes. Better rendered - yes, but nothing of the same level of satisfaction :) I think I know the answer but like with any art it’s difficult to put into words. Easier to make something with the similar energy. Perhaps one day …
>… Scanner Sombre
Thank you for the advice. I’ll take a look. I recall Elite was also nice once . I’ve made computer that was able to run it with my own hands which involved soldering and debugging it with oscilloscope for the first time in my life. So it was a double pleasure once it worked :) Or double magic :)
Making dedicated hardware seems amazing. I wish I had the time for it.