My Story of 3D Realms / Apogee Part I (2020) | Hacker News Reader

My Story of 3D Realms / Apogee Part I (2020)

joesiegler.blog

When I was probably 13 years old, I got Duke Nukem 3D. I really wanted to figure out how to build my own levels. I had found other levels online and I couldn't figure it out. My 7th grade teacher made us do was write formal letters as a project for class. So I wrote a snail mail support request to 3D Realms asking for help getting set up with build.exe. They sent me a printed version of the manual, and some troubleshooting tips for the issue I was having.

Now I wonder if it was this guy that resonded...

Might have been Ken Silverman. https://advsys.net/ken

As a kid I played Ken's Labyrinth, a raycaster FPS from around the same time as Wolf3D. Only years later I found out that this was actually the same Ken Silverman that went on to create the Build engine for Duke Nukem 3D etc. Kind of funny considering the vast difference in tone between these two games.

edit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken%27s_Labyrinth

Don't leave us hanging! Did you get a level built?!

hah! I tried to recreate my local mall, I didn't get super far, but I did have a lot of fun doing it!!

Darn, current 3DR took down the legacy site? Their CEO went on a big spiel a while back about how he's such a big fan of the "original" 3DR, and grew up on their games and whatnot, gave a pretty good impression. But taking the legacy site down gives an entirely opposite feeling about it...

Joe has been pretty cranky about current-3DR on his socials, I guess he was right about it.

from the article:

> So space considerations were very real when a large part of your customer base existed on 300 & 1200bps modems in the mid 90’s.

I somewhat did a double take at this.

My family had by no means a really generous budget for i386 platform home PC equipment in the early to mid 1990s, but I clearly remember a basic ISA interface, internal, hayes compatible 2400 baud modem in mid 1993 being really affordable and fairly shortly thereafter getting upgraded to a 14.4k. The 2400 bps modem came as part of a package deal with a 486DX/33 we bought in spring 1993.

In the local BBS scene in mid to late 1993 there were pretty much zero people actually using 300 or 1200 bps modems.

It might have been different if you went back to like 1990 or mid 1991, probably there were a lot of people with 1200 baud modems, but that would be before my time.

If we say that "mid 1990s" means 1994-1996, by that time almost everyone had upgraded to 14.4k and then very quickly to 28.8 modems if they could afford it, by mid '96.

My recollection is that, from 1992-ish onwards, traditional 2400 and 1200/75 modems actually became more expensive than 14k4.

The reason being that the older standards were used for specific enterprise applications (eg. travel agent viewdata required 1200/75, remote data reporting often ran at 2400) and generally used the most expensive branded modems (Hayes, Microcom, Multitech/IBM).

It was the vendors in the tier below that (Telebit, Supra, USR) that drove the increasing baud rates (often ahead of standardisation) - and it was their products that the no-name vendors cloned and sold at bargain-basement prices.

The difference was pretty huge in terms of user experience. At 14k4, your typical Apogee game was easy enough to download on a whim, but if you were stuck on 2400 you really had to want it.

Having a PC at all back then made you relatively privileged and probably relatively wealthy compared to those of us living in families on food stamps.

I saved money and bought a 2400 baud modem from a classified ad for $25 (had to drive a couple of towns over to pick it up) in something like 1995. IIRC, it was well over a hundred dollars for a 14.4 modem at whatever time that was. My whole 8086 PS/2 computer was salvaged parts, paid for by my own savings from my underage labor.

Ah, the old days of shareware on floppies. My brother and I loved Apogee games.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com