Doom Connector Archive (Memorial Thread, old EXEs and screenshots)

 

Hey everyone, with the semi-recent passing of the latest Doom Connector - which will quite possibly the final attempt to revitalize it's long-dead corpse - I just wanted to post an archive of ALL the Doom Connector / Player Connector / Skulltag Online content that I could find out there. Despite being dead, it deserves an archive. After all, it was a very important piece of Doom community history, especially on the multiplayer side.

 

I originally posted this thread in 2016 but felt this final nail in the coffin warranted a proper sendoff.

 

I know Vindict6, Mr Rocket, Boko, Dagger and many others poured so much effort into getting this thing reanimated time and time again over the years, but I just don't think it ever had a chance in the post-2010 world, by which time it was already a shell of it's former self. I know there's a part of each of us that wants to turn back the clock, but for the sake of respecting the dead, I think we all have to finally accept that it's dust in the wind. That's just my opinion though, if anyone does end up wanting to hook the jumper cables back up to it's corpse, I'll help however I can - I just think it's futile these days..

 

Without further ado, here are ALL of the DC screenshots I could find, in kinda-sorta-mostly chronological order:

^{(More are welcome if any old fogies have any other remains lying around, of course)}

 

 

 

 

Skulltag Online:

 

 

 

 

Player Connector:

 

 

 

 

Some of the attempted reboots over the years:

 

 

 

 

Misc images and logos and stuff:

 

 

(The old splash screen as you were logging in!)

 

 

 

Every old Doom Connector related thread I could find (lulz inbound)

 

Old Doom Connector Website #1 (2001) - https://web.archive.org/web/20011212025804/http://www.xodemultimedia.com/xodepage.php?page=dlc

 

Old Doom Connector Website #2 (2004) - https://web.archive.org/web/20040405201409/http://www.codeimp.com/connector_info.php

 

 

 

..Hopefully some of you enjoy this little sendoff and trip down memory lane. They were good times while they lasted!

 

(old post from 2016 below)

 

Edited February 21, 2020 by Doomkid

I used to use DC back when I still went by only my first name. (Maybe you remember me...?)

I used to have old logs/PMs and all of the stupid sound effects that would get spammed in rooms constantly but I think the drive they're on is long gone. Oh well.

I think I kept using it after it had become "Skulltag Online" but I don't remember that much about it. I don't really have any contact with most of the people on DC I used to play with anymore either.

The nick Revenant does seem very familiar, but what was your DC handle? Any logs that have any variation on "doomkid", that's me. I was around from the birth of DC, I only know of 10 or less old users who stop in once in a blue moon.

I used to be Devin. Well, I still am, but you know what I mean.

Didn't we both used to be in <C-D>?

Holy crap man, it's been forever! I actually saw ElitePrime for the first (and last) time about 6 months or so ago, and MORBIDTWATT recently had a chat with me on Zdaemon. GhostlyDeath has been around here regularly too as of late. Nice to see some old Clan Delta people are still cruising!

Any of you crazy file savers out there happen to have "connector24_setup.exe" by chance? I know it's a long shot, but the only EXE I can find is DC3 and above, and I'd like to have DC2 and Doom Legacy Connector for historic interest, but both installers seem to have vanished from the face of the earth, I wasn't even able to find them from the old Xode Multimedia site at Archive.org. I'd love to take a look at them for the first time in many years, give a shout if anyone happens to have that old crap laying around!

Also, some screenshots, the only ones I could find:

This was DC2. This was how the program looked when I first used it, probably around October 2001 or so - This is the same EXE I'm seeking, mainly just to look at all those old avatars and whatnot. The fact that this screenshot even exists is thanks to YTMND, oddly enough. (Also I vividly remember watching the Rams VS Patriots superbowl game while being on DC in early 2002.. Some of those random little moments you just never forget for some reason.)

There's a bit of backstory for all those "Catfishking" rooms.. IIRC he was about a year or two older than me, we used to play DC together regularly for a few months then he randomly decided to go crazy and crash the entire service - I don't even remember how, exactly. I very clearly remember a "Doom Connector is down, and you can thank Catfishking for that!" type of message present for a while til it finally came back up.

That screenshot was apparently taken by Jippy. Wonder where he went to.. And I wonder what the old OFoD url was. Would love to check archive.org if anyone remembers, I want to see that "I'm the best Doomer ever!" animation again..

EDIT: lol, Jippy's old YTMND account that hasn't been used since 2007 seems to have a few DC moments saved actually.. Some pretty absurd ones to boot - http://ytmnd.com/users/DemonZero/sites

 

Edited February 21, 2020 by Doomkid

I wonder what fortokesuseonly.wad was

I literally just noticed that and googled it, naturally found no results.. I have to imagine that screenshot was before the accident.

Man i have no idea why i never played on DC? :D I played on GameZone around 2002 late or something, and i remember these elite players played on zone.com. But i was never good enough plus dialup so i played only on GameZone. I guess DC was some place for noobs or something? ?:D

DC was a melting pot of all sorts of Doomers, since it supported ZD, Skulltag, Legacy, ZDoom etc - in fact, the super easy interface / room system made many ports much easier to launch from DC than anything else.

I was pretty new back then, but I was just a deathmatch newb, not a n00b ;)

Its basically what doom explorer is today then. What is sad tho. Nobody ever made a port with which you should join any source port or at least the popular ones. This should be really c00l but i think DC was really c00l too.

Melfice said:

Heh, I uninstalled Doom Connector half a year ago if not more, the stupidity level got to me, and I didn't want to be consumed by it.

Twiztid said:

HeH, yea I pretty much did the same as Melfice for the same reason.

Protip: Main channels of any chat system are where stupidiy displays itself. If you want to have less shitty conversations it's always best to make your own channels\rooms\whatever.

even irc is like this really, besides the main channel Zandro irc is pretty decent for example

DC was a great concept but towards the end people just weren't receptive. As one of the people in the later years who tried to get users (and fail) people seemed to prefer IDE. To this day I'm still not quite sure why, but I guess I'm just as guilty for jumping ship to Skulltag.

It certainly was a huge part of my life and I still talk to some of the people from 03 to this day.

rip STO

Doom Connector was a huge part of my life between 2003 and about.. 2006 I suppose. I was a moderator on both there and Skulltag Online (I went by Mike.Reiner back in those days).

I'll talk to Aftermath, I'm pretty sure he has more screenshots of DC.

I still occasionally talk to a lot of those guys.. Macro11_1, Madcat Mayhem, Ermac, Megazzzuex, Mr Goth, Alysium X (often just went by X), Mr. Rocket, Zorcher, Aftermath, Gixbit, Tal'Set, dittohead.. more recently Zap came back (hi zappsta) Sadly I lost touch with Hobbex, Pain Elemental, Moti, Deeebo, Jippy, Dagger, ragnew, -=Garrett=- (played the SHIT out of exec.wad with that dude, and I had to do some digging but another guy: Rellik, I loved playing deathmatch with that guy.)

NetNomad disappeared late last decade.. last time Mega or I heard from him he was just done with Doom, Tower of War had all 32 maps completed and just required playtesting. He wasn't able to get very much feedback and shelved it. I still have the full megawad but never felt like it would be ethical to release it unless he gave me permission.

By the way if anybody remembers ViolentLiverStuka, around the time he disappeared he was talking about dealing with cancer. Heard from him a few years ago that he survived that.

@doomkid
Your best bet for getting any old installers or related stuff would be from Zorcher, but he left behind Doom quite a while ago when PC/DC was put to rest. I've seen him on steam maybe once in the last year.

I remember seeing you back then. Most of those nicks are familiar, very nostalgic seeing those names again. Like Zap, I wonder what it is that just wasn't catching people near the end. Being able to start a room for any port was very convenient, it would be nice to have that in addition to the stuff IDE /Doomseeker offers.

Aftermath (Doomsday) dug up a couple shots, he's still digging through 14 years of data.

Here's a shot from when CodeImp went by Gherkin


DC4 I guess, unknown when this was taken.


A shot Mr.Rocket took showing that you could customize the colors.. man did I ever!

Note at this point DC would show what country you were in based on your IP address.. unless you happened to be connecting on the same network the server is hosted on. Zorcher hosted it in this time period. He was never willing to modify anything to make it less obvious that he was the host lol.

Sometime later he 'killed' DC and brought in 'Player Connector'

We have a wiki article on that here:
http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Player_Connector
Archive.org capture:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060718192323/http://www.playerconnector.com/

The installer can be downloaded from there if you are so inclined DoomKid... I know it's not strictly DC but it is very much related.

A capture of the Doom Connector site Mr.Rocket used to have hosted on his comcast website:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150116110424/http://home.comcast.net/~mrrocket/dcsite_finals/doomconnector.htm


And lastly this gem:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/84neuedutugswth/ofod-intro%5B1%5D.swf

The intro flash animation to clan [OFoD] (Old Fogies of Doom)

I'm so glad you have that flash animation, that's the first time I've seen that in at least 10 years. Gotta love the literal catfish king on his shirt.

I know for certain there were more flash animations, but I have had no success in tracking them down. I believe they were all the work of Jippy.


Funny memories coming to mind...

One of the first times I used DC it was on an old Windows 98 PC. CodeImp was asking if anybody in the lobby was running Windows 98, I spoke up. He told me to start spamming the lobby. My OS crashed.

When I rebooted and got back in he said it was a bug in DC with 9x operating systems, he put a limit in that stopped it at 3 to avoid flooding so it wouldn't happen again.

And I remember one time as a newbie bugging the ever loving shit out of Mr.Rocket to help me setup the source ports... oh man.

i miss zero's shitposting

The ratio of doom legacy rooms in those screenshots is too low they might be fake =p

Good call, Legacy was my favorite port back in that era! I know the CD crew used it more frequently than the other ports.

I'm wondering what was the appeal of Doom Legacy back then. It seems that out of all the source-ports that were available, this one was the least annoying one for coop games. Coop in ZDaemon was hilarious at most as Revenant's fireballs didn't home in for clients - they would always fly straight. They would still home in on the server-side, you just wouldn't see it. Every Revenant fireball was scary like hell and you had to hide as soon as you saw it because you were never sure where it was at the moment. But ZDaemon ruled in DM and CTF, especially since it had that ranking system that you could quickly conquer by playing only on those servers that hosted maps that allowed you to win by spamming BFG. There even was this one clan (or rather a loose group) of BFG9000 spammers that I was a member of. I can't remember the name, though.

Doom Legacy had FraggleScript, 3D floors in software mode, split screen mode and in-game joining to network games. I used to make maps for Doom Legacy before I discovered ZDoom. I had a WAD called "avebeta.wad" with 15 maps. Sadly, these maps were lost in a hard-drive crash and I don't think that anyone has them anymore. Doom Lagacy also had horrible lags that everyone suffered from if a player with a poor connection joined the game.

Ah yes, good ol' DC (Past, Present, Future)

Ha. there I am as [dp]Eclipse in one of the pics. Before that I was known as *Dominater666*, nice spelling and edgy numbers, definitely a badass 13 year old. Great times back then: any port, low gravity, sniper shotguns, railgun deathmatches in the snow with your sqaud...

We'd often play some new cool wad wario was working on, using legacy...

Nostalgic looking at those shots and seeing the old users. Shame DC died as I loved it.

Evolution said:

Ha. there I am as [dp]Eclipse in one of the pics. Before that I was known as *Dominater666*, nice spelling and edgy numbers, definitely a badass 13 year old. Great times back then: any port, low gravity, sniper shotguns, railgun deathmatches in the snow with your sqaud...

We'd often play some new cool wad wario was working on, using legacy...

Nostalgic looking at those shots and seeing the old users. Shame DC died as I loved it.

Well we're trying to #MakeDCGreatAgain... It's definitely a work in progress, and I know lots of people will keep using other programs, but DC will always be a part of me.

I used to play on Doom Connector quite regularly back in 2003-2004. I used to play as sYk0 or sYk0_frEak and was briefly in a clan with Da_Maniac.

 

I might as well go ahead and throw this out there..

We are currently working on a Game Connector.

Dagger is Admin.

 

Aside from the usual Doom games, it's sort of like Player Connector as it supports several other games like it did.

Game Connector is a Frankenstein of sorts, it's basically DC4 and PC3 in one.

I've added client server MAME support btw. :)

 

At the moment we're looking for a better host to support more clients.

Then I'll be back to post a download link, stay tuned!

 

 

I'm keen to give it a spin, MrRocket!