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.
Related Stories
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4463
John Romero, the game developer virtuoso behind Hexen, Quake, Wolfenstein, and other games still being remade and sequelized to this day, just dropped a massive, free mod for one of his most famous and popular creations: Doom.
The new expansion is called "Sigil", and it's the unofficial fifth episode in the game's story (three episodes were part of the original release, a fourth was added with the Ultimate Doom edition from 1995). It contains nine single-player levels and nine deathmatch levels and is "megawad"-sized, meaning it's almost the same size as a commercial game.
[...] If you want to try your hand at "Sigil", you can download it from Romero's website. You'll need the original Doom in order to play it, though that's readily available on Steam.
Source: https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2019/06/01/doom-creator-john-romero-sigil-addition/
Previously: John Romero Gifts 'Doom' 18 New Levels For Its 25th Birthday
(Score: 2, Disagree) by bob_super on Wednesday December 12 2018, @12:35AM (13 children)
Getting the game is easy, but having once again to boot from the DOS floppy in order to have enough free space in the 640kB could be a problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @01:00AM (4 children)
DOOM ran in about 600k plus 1-2MB of XMS/EMM. Getting to 600k in DOS was fairly easy. Past 620 or so and you are in for a bit of challenge.
These days use one of the open source ones (which he did) or DOSBox.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday December 12 2018, @01:21AM (2 children)
Oh, god, those memories. Tuning your system to get enough memory for the game. Who decided that 640kb should enough forever?
I had many different templates to boot into DOS with support for different games. Thank God for the developers of DOSBOX and our newer emulators.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by SomeGuy on Wednesday December 12 2018, @04:07AM (1 child)
IBM. They were the ones who set that maximum in their BIOS as well as set the location of their video card memory making it impossible for a true IBM PC hardware clone to reach the full 1mb addressable by the 8088/8086. The 1mb address space limit was the the fault of Intel, but keep in mind that when the 8086 was released even the ~64k accessible by most 8-bit CPUs was a lot.
It was also partly IBM's fault for not providing a better OS in a timely manner that could use 286 or 386 memory. When they finally did release one, it was a bit too late.
Also the market itself demanded 8088 compatible DOS applications, rather than switch to some new incompatible OS.
You should thank the DOSBOX folks directly. They were the ones who did the work. Not some imaginary sky penis.
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by edIII on Wednesday December 12 2018, @04:13AM
Excuse me? I prefer to worship imaginary sky vagina. Don't make assumptions.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shortscreen on Wednesday December 12 2018, @09:42AM
Not exactly. DOOM used DOS/4G [wikipedia.org] which means 32-bit protected mode. It didn't need any XMS/EMS driver and didn't need much conventional memory as long as there was around 3MB free in total between conventional and extended.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 12 2018, @01:09AM (3 children)
https://zdoom.org/index [zdoom.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Redundant) by bob_super on Wednesday December 12 2018, @01:35AM (1 child)
You're nostalgia-ing wrong.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by takyon on Wednesday December 12 2018, @03:45AM
Memories of troubleshooting games in DOS are best left in the dustbin of history.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by NotSanguine on Wednesday December 12 2018, @05:26AM
I can (and occasionally do) run Doom/Heretic/Hexen on Doomsday Engine [dengine.net], the latest version (Linux/Win/Mac) of which can be had from here [dengine.net].
Just import the WAD, then Bob's your uncle and Fanny's your granny!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Informative) by hoeferbe on Wednesday December 12 2018, @04:41AM (3 children)
If you're running GNU/Linux, you can point Vavoom [vavoom-engine.com] at the game's .wad file. I believe it is Free and Open Source Software, since it is included in Fedora Linux's repository.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Wednesday December 12 2018, @02:46PM (2 children)
I'd never heard of Vavoom (I see it has not been updated for a long time), despite being moderately active in Doom circles. But that's only one of several "modern" versions of Doom executables (called "Doom ports"), the most popular of which seems to be PRBoom+ followed by ZDoom (mentioned here). PRBoom+ has been ported to all sorts of platforms including handhelds and Wii, and is in the Fedora and Debian (hence Ubuntu etc) repositories, and obviously to WIndows. These ports are free and open source, but for any of them to run you need a large (by 1990's standards ~15Mb) data file known as the "iwad" file, of which there are several versions (I use "doom2.wad") - these iwad files include the original ID Software game levels and are NOT free (the original and now obsolete iwad, "doom.wad", was shareware).
The modern doom ports should be capable of running even the original game levels (PRBoom+ certainly does) but can also cater for later game features like water depth, conveyor belts, and even an optional pack of aggressive "helper dogs" to accompany you. There is no reason whatever to use the original doom.exe today (which was actually a bit buggy) unless you really want to re-live the struggle with DOS.
As well as an executable Doom port and an iwad file, you can load a third party level (such as Romero's new levels), also with the ".wad" suffix, of which there are thousands on the Doom fan websites. During loading, these patch over the original level maps in the iwad file. These third party levels vary from crap, through joke, to excellent professional quality. Most are free but some were made for boxed sales back in the 1990's. I still design (with Eureka on Linux) and play levels, and the longevity of Doom is due to the constant flow of new levels, and to the fact that level designing is within the capabilities of one person.
(Score: 2) by hoeferbe on Thursday December 13 2018, @01:52AM (1 child)
Thanks for informing me about PRBoom. I saw it in the Fedora repository as an "Open source port of the DOOM game engine", but neglected to give it a try.
Although it does not have the GUI launcher that Vavoom has, I see the command line arguments are pretty extensive. In fact, I already like how PRBoom lets one start the Doom game in a window instead of fullscreen. (If there is a way to do that in Vavoom, I have not found it.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday December 13 2018, @10:38AM
Just to be clear, you said "PRBoom" rather than "PRBoom+". Plain PRBoom is now somewhat obsolete, the last version (2.5.0) was in 2008 but the project has been continued to the present day (2017 at least) by a different maintainer as "PRBoom+"; it does add some features like the ability to look up and down. In the Debian repository it is called "prboom-plus" and the "prboom" in the repository is I believe just a link to "prboom-plus".
You might also notice something in the repositories called "Freedoom". This in effect includes a free and open source doom iwad (replacing the commercial ones such as "doom2.wad"). I have tried it briefly; the graphics are somewhat different, although the monsters are recognisable.
PRBoom evolved from a combination of Boom (a DOS port of Doom) and LXDoom (a Linux port), the underlying game engine being from LXDoom. Both Boom and LXDoom evolved from the original ID Software UNIX code of Doom which was developed on a Next workstation, never sold commercially but later open sourced. PRBoom was recomended by ID Software themselves for ports to other devices such as handhelds as it was very stable and faithfully reproduced the behaviour of the original Doom executable (minus the bugs). I had a small involvement with this evolution and my name is in the PRBoom credits somewhere :-)
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 16 2018, @05:05AM
John Romero's about to make you his bitch... suck it down.