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from the Anniversary-Spectacular-of-Spooky-Doom dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Ready to feel ancient? The original Doom is 25 years old -- and co-creator John Romero wants to make sure you know it. He's preparing an add-on for the 1993 game, Sigil, that serves as a "spiritual successor" to the classic shooter's fourth episode ("Thy Flesh Consumed") with nine single-player story levels as well as nine multiplayer deathmatch levels. The expansion will be free if you're just looking for some nostalgia-fueled demon slaying, but you can also spend a lot of money on it if you're determined to flaunt your fandom.
[...] Both the new levels and the physical copies are expected to arrive in mid-February.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/10/john-romero-doom-sigil-expansion/
According to Paul Thurrott, there will be 9 new single players levels and 9 new death match levels released for free but you will need the original DOS game in order to play them. It's planned for mid February so comfortably misses the 25 year anniversary.
"SIGIL is the spiritual successor to the fourth episode of DOOM, and picks up where the original left off."
I'm guessing you could get a legitimate copy from Good Old Games or fire up DOSBOX if you still have a version on floppy that will actually load.
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheFool on Wednesday December 12 2018, @12:45AM (8 children)
Doom still has an active modding community, and part of that is making level sets like this one. It's cool to see Romero himself doing a new one though.
If you do want to play this, do yourself a favor and run it in one of the newer engines that exists today rather than trying to run it in something like DOSBOX. You'll get native support for things like Linux and more modern resolutions, at the very least, or a whole different game if you go for something based on ZDoom.My personal favorite is prboom+ [sourceforge.net] but I haven't gone looking for a new one in a few years to see if they are any better.
These do require some resource files from the base games so you'll need to have a copy somewhere. Although, honestly, these files aren't hard to find now).
Open sourcing the engine was a really good move on their part. I'm grateful they did it. It's a fun game to start with, and it has seemingly infinite fan-made content. I come back to it every year or so and play through a few new megawads (level sets, for those not familiar with the terms).
(Score: 2, Funny) by c0lo on Wednesday December 12 2018, @02:25AM (1 child)
Oh, God, is sourceforge still a thing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday December 12 2018, @04:24PM
Yes, it didn't die with their malware packaging blunder.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday December 12 2018, @02:28PM (5 children)
Am I a rarity in that I expect to play this on a Windows 98 laptop running wireless Novell IPX/SPX from the command prompt?
I've got a Voodoo3 card, a roland sound canvas daughterboard on a Soundblaster 32 AWE card, and the best docking station available for the laptop in question. I migrated the disk drives to solid state (I had to use an IDE to CF card and IDE to SD card converter to allow for two drives) and have a ramdisk I can actually compress--and stored the swap file on it.
Maybe that is hard core. I am sure an emulated system on my desktop would run faster, but it's just not the same...
Anyway I have a second identical laptop but without all those add-ons (except it'll also be wireless IPX/SPX). It'll be enough for this to play multiplayer!
I might set up a GRE tunnel between routers over a firewall based IPSec VPN tunnel so that I can bridge the same IPX network over the internet to a friends house halfway across the country--but I don't know how IPX latency will hold up over wireless through a GRE tunnel in an IPSec tunnel across the internet. I guess there's one way to find out; Doom was always a bit sensitive to LAN performance but then again, it worked OK on token-ring 4mb once they stopped using broadcasts to transmit all game traffic...
(for those unaware, ipx and ip based broadcasts on token-ring or 802.5 networks... did not quite work as id intended or probably even tested for reasons I can't go into here, but unicast of course works just fine...)
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday December 12 2018, @04:28PM (2 children)
Run Win98 on the modern internet at your own risk. May cause cancer in the state of California.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @04:58PM (1 child)
May? Will, F-man, will.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:52PM
I hate to break it to you, but the modern "internet" works fine, as long as it doesn't mean you're talking about what the World Wide Web has turned into.
For an OS with the browser built in, it doesn't work the way they intended anymore, but that's OK, because I never quite used it the way they intended.
It actually demonstrates pretty well why they want everyone on windows as a service--there'll be no way to work around things with them in control. But anyway, the laptop works great for everything I used to do on it back before I got a new one in 2000 or 2001. It actually does those things *better* now that I've been able to upgrade it with things I couldn't afford, or didn't even exist at the time.
That said, I don't use it for much. I have to turn it on now and then to keep the flash storage from going stale. And of course, make sure its in working shape for the occasional hexen/heretic/doom/descent and other older games like red alert and age of empires.
Emulation can't capture the roland sound canvas music; there's also a certain ambience to surpassing limitations on old hardware or getting that upgrade you never dreamed you could get, and reliving some of the games with options enabled you couldn't try before (even if it it all pales compared to modern gear). Going retro can make a geek feel a little younger and a little older at the same time, and it's that much more appealing when its on original hardware that actually works in ways you couldn't afford in the past.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @06:10PM
But musl libc still has the hooks if you run an older kernel, and there are still utilities for it, as well as proper inter-network routing capabilities if you are not on network id 3 (the default). I've been gaining interest in adding netfilter support for ipx and getting ipx routing available for linux, freedos, and windows 3.x/9x users once again.
Maybe I will post here if I get the basics going in case anyone else is like me and still interested. It needs a lot of love, but it sure bets the abortion of ipv6 :)
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday December 12 2018, @08:43PM
Nah, I would love to do that. I still actually have the Windows 98 CD I originally installed to run Doom on. I found it while moving house, memories...
No longer have the right vintage machine to run it on. Had a soundblaster 16 myself back then, with an interesting graphics setup. It was a standard graphics card, with a patch VGA cable to the "VGA IN", of the second graphics card. Then standard VGA cable from the "VGA out" to the CRT.
Alas, the hardware side of things is long gone (just didn't have the space to keep it all), and I can't remember the graphics card. Does it ring a bell for anyone?
I do miss the CRT's amazing contrast, at night, when playing doom, the screen black would actually match the room black, which made it so much more immersive. Even my (relatively) recent IPS display still can't match the old CRT for colour or contrast, unfortunately.