Doom I, II, III on modern day computers (A Guide)

1357913579 Death Cog Machine
edited April 2012 in Spurious Generalities
This is a guide on how to play Doom I, II, Hexan, Heretic and Strife on modern day computers (With online multiplayer support for Doom I and II). This also includes some Doom III mods to make the game worth playing.

Before I begin, I want to highly suggest at least trying Skulltag online, it has an active community and very good online play. More in the Skulltag section.


As many of you probably know, Doom was the second first person shooter made. It was published by ID software, who also made the original first person shooter, Wolfenstein 3d. Although the graphics are extremely dated, it still holds up as one of the greatest games of all time. It defined first person shooters, and I highly recommend trying it out.

If you want to play any of the older ID software games like Doom on today's machines, you need the original .WAD files (Contain all the game information) and a port. There are several ports to choose from, but in my experience there are only three you can really go with, depending on what you want out of them.

Those three are Skulltag, Zdoom and Jdoom.

Skulltag is what you want if you're after bots, alternate game modes and active online play.

Zdoom is for highly sophisticated mods and scripting functionality.

Jdoom is for major HD graphical enhancements while retaining the fast-paced style of Doom.

Here are some summaries of each port:

SKULLTAG:
Skulltag is the port of choice for those who play Doom I and II online. It has an active online community, with support for mods online.

It introduces 4 new weapons, new enemies, several online game modes (Deathmatch, Coop, Invasion, Terminator, Last Man Standing, CTF, Team Deathmatch, Team Last Man Standing, One Flag CTF, Skulltag, Instagib and Buckshot), New powerups and a new category of powerups called "Runes".

Website: http://www.skulltag.com


Zdoom:
Zdoom is the choice of modders and people who love to play mods. There are hundreds of high-quality mods for Zdoom that completely change gameplay. Supports all Doom wads, Hexen, Heretic and Strife. Supports online play, though I have no idea how to use it.

Website: http://www.zdoom.org

My favorite mod is Zen Dynamics, which adds reloading, replaces all weapons, new enemies, complete 20-something level singleplayer, alternate endings, and hidden levels.

Jdoom:
Jdoom introduces HD graphics, particle effects, 3D models, etc. and retains the fast paced intense gameplay of Doom. It can be difficult to set up and configure at times, and if you want every enhancement you must download individual packages that replace the default content with user-made content. Supports online play, though I have no idea how it works. Fun to see everything in nice HD graphics and sound.

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Website: http://www.dengine.net


Now, onto Doom III. This game was a huge dissapointment to many, but there are two mods out there that change all that: Perfected Doom III and Sikkmod.

Perfected Doom III is the combination of several mods, including an older version of Sikkmod. It would take forever to list every feature, but here are a key few: Ironsights for all weapons, zombies only die from headshots, increased enemy AI, new enemies/maps/bossfights, new weapon (Supershotgun), alternate fire button for all weapons, HDR, Bloom, high-rez textures... It's what the game should have been. The latest version is 6.2.1.

Sikkmod is a bit more in depth options wise, it adds all the graphical enhancements Perfected Doom 3 does, but has several pages of options. Weapon mag size, enemy health (Original, realistic, Doom II), body location damage, it even has options to randomly spawn in enemies on the map at random time intervals to keep you on your toes.

Comments

  • Darth BeaverDarth Beaver Meine Ehre heißt Treue
    edited April 2012
    I remember playing this on a 486 running Windows 95 with a Thrust Master joystick.
  • ArkansanArkansan Regular
    edited April 2012
    Hell yes! I love these old shooters, thanks for the info. I seem to remember there being some sort of mod for Duke Nukem 3d that would run it on newer machines but I can't remember the name of it for the life of me. I have been playing through Daggerfall using DosBox here lately, I would imagine you could Doom 1 and 2 on DosBox as well.
  • Darth BeaverDarth Beaver Meine Ehre heißt Treue
    edited April 2012
    If you use DOSBox you should check out D-Fend Reloaded. D-Fend Reloaded is graphical environment for DOSBox.
  • ArkansanArkansan Regular
    edited April 2012
    Cool, that looks like a major time saver, thanks for the heads up. Downloading as we speak.
  • RemadERemadE Global Moderator
    edited April 2012
    OH GOD, YES! :fap:

    Giving this a shot. Nostalgia!
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