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Dahe

Doom as operating system on a floppy disk

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Hello! First of all, I want to clarify that I am using google traslante, in case there are parts that are not understood (I speak Spanish xD) Well, I have a floppy disk of 1.44mb. I wanted to know if there was any way to install Doom 1 on it, so that it is an operating system (I mean, being able to play directly, without the need of a hard drive on the PC, only with the floppy disk) I do not know if this is possible, but I had read "Doom operative system" on a page, and I came up with this. Any kind of help is welcome! Salu2: D (or greetings xD)

 

---------------Hola! Primero que nada, quiero aclararles que estoy usando google traslante, por si hay partes que no se entienden (hablo español xD)

Bueno, tengo un floppy disk de 1.44mb. Quería saber si había alguna forma de instalar Doom 1 en él, de modo que sea un sistema operativo (osea, poder jugar directamente, sin la necesidad de un disco duro en la pc; solo con el floppy disk)

No sé si esto es posible, pero había leído  "Doom operative system" en una página, y se me ocurrió esto.

Cualquier tipo de ayuda es bienvenida! 

Salu2 :D
(o saludos xD)

 

 

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Do you want play doom on retro computer or on modern computer?

 

For modern one, you need buy doom from steam or gog, extract(copy and paste) doom.wad or doom2.wad, get port like gzdoom, chocolate doom or prboom+ and put everything in folder of your choice(ports and wads) and load port. It should work. 

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Yes. For xp, I'm not sure if modern gzdoom will work, maybe get last zdoom build. Prboom+ will work too on xp. 

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okay, thanks! I will try to do something xD
 

 

I will write if I have a problem!

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I would recommend both PRBoom+ and either ZDoom32 or GZDoom as ports to use. ZDoom will run anything, but PRBoom will have much better performance on the maps it can run, which are Boom-compatible and vanilla.

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@Dahe

 

Since for PRBoom, ZDoom, etc. all you need is the wad file, you can also buy a used copy of the game on CD (for example, from eBay), and copy the doom.wad or doom2.wad file from the CD to your computer. That way you don't have to worry about compatibility and being able to install the game itself.

 

 

 

And here's the Google translate translation (I haven't written a significant amount in Spanish in about 20 years, so whatever I would try to write myself would likely be incomprehensible--even more than the Google version may be):

 

Dado que para PRBoom, Zoom, etc. fuente todo lo que necesita es el archivo wad, también puede comprar una copia usada del juego en un CD (por ejemplo, desde eBay) y copiar el archivo doom.wad o doom2.wad del CD a su computadora. . De esta forma, no tendrá que preocuparse por la compatibilidad y la posibilidad de instalar el juego en sí.

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If you have an LS-120 or Iomega Zip, it's probably feasible using DOS.

 

It's probably even easier to load up Linux on a CD/DVD or USB and have Doom on it already, and less likely to have any headaches about hardware compatibility.

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Can't Doom shareware be played from a single floppy with DOS installed? I know you can do it with a boot floppy and Doom on a CD-ROM.

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4 hours ago, kb1 said:

Can't Doom shareware be played from a single floppy with DOS installed? I know you can do it with a boot floppy and Doom on a CD-ROM.

You can't fit 4MB into 1.44MB. Even with the best compression we have now, you can only compact the IWAD to ~1.3MB, and you still need room left for the executable and the OS itself, and the additional means to unpack that.

Edited by Edward850

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20 hours ago, Edward850 said:

You can't fit 4MB into 1.44MB. Even with the best compression we have now, you can only compact the IWAD to ~1.3MB, and you still need room left for the executable and the OS itself, and the additional means to unpack that.

So the only logical thing to do is install it on to a CD-RW(700MB) or a DVD-RW (4.7GB) Since they can hold alot more data then a floppy disk.

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21 hours ago, Edward850 said:

You can't fit 4MB into 1.44MB. Even with the best compression we have now, you can only compact the IWAD to ~1.3MB, and you still need room left for the executable and the OS itself, and the additional means to unpack that.

Oooh - that's right - I forgot it was 4Mb. The CD option could work, though. Also, a boot-to-USB option is possible. It would be an interesting project: Try to trim down the shareware IWAD, and get a small OS, doom1.exe, and doom1(hack).wad onto a floppy. I suppose you could remove all the rotated sprites, truncate sounds and music, some menu items, help screens, etc. You not really supposed to edit the shareware, but that's probably more intended to prevent playing PWADs.

 

Of course, hard drives are pretty cheap, especially nowadays.

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On 8/8/2018 at 10:03 PM, Edward850 said:

You can't fit 4MB into 1.44MB. Even with the best compression we have now, you can only compact the IWAD to ~1.3MB, and you still need room left for the executable and the OS itself, and the additional means to unpack that.

Too bad 2.88MB floppies weren't more common (I've never seen one), one of those plus some compression and a RAMdisk should easily be able to handle Shareware DOOM. (I'm not sure if 2M floppies are bootable, they can fit around 1.8MB so if I get a chance I'll try one this weekend.)

 

I have a 32MB USB drive I bought about 15 years ago (for $50!) that more than once I've considered putting DOOM on. I think the main reasons I haven't is that:

  1. Systems that can boot DOS from it generally won't have a sound card compatible with the original DOOM executables.
  2. Linux or another OS, even stripped down with buildroot or something, won't leave enough space for the IWAD. But I never considered just using the shareware IWAD...

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On 8/6/2018 at 2:30 AM, chungy said:

If you have an LS-120

I'd forgotten those things existed. They were great. Really wished they had caught on and that type of technology been developed further.

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What I want to know is:  what kind of ancient PC has a floppy drive but not a hard disk?

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Just now, BrutalDoomisAwesome said:

The Apple II just to name one.

 

Well, yes, I can name a bunch too. But my question was really why OP was trying to install Doom on one!

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18 hours ago, Bauul said:

What I want to know is:  what kind of ancient PC has a floppy drive but not a hard disk?

Pretty much all of them before around 1985. Hard drives before then were extremely expensive and vulnerable to corruption and failure for all sorts of reasons. Many had two floppy drives, and you would need both of them at once for many tasks. By the time Doom came around, games that booted or were even capable of being run from a floppy had gone extinct.

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4 minutes ago, Woolie Wool said:

By the time Doom came around, games that booted or were even capable of being run from a floppy had gone extinct.

 

I wouldn't say they had gone extinct exactly.  I was still using one such computer when Doom was a released: a Commodore Amiga 1500, released in 1990, and was precisely as you described: no hard-drive, two floppy disks.  Great selection of games, and all of them ran off the floppy-drive directly.

 

And just to confirm, I didn't ask what computers had a floppy drive and no hard-disk, but what computer has one.  Current tense.  I was just interested to know what cool retro tech the OP was rocking.

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Surely someone, somewhere, has attempted to create a bootable PC-compatible floppy to play Doom on? This seems like the sort of thing that actually might have been potentially useful to someone in, say, 1994?

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I remember games back in the day having the option to create a boot disk for them, which you would use to meet memory requirements or something along those lines. It wasn't a standalone solution, you still loaded the game from the hard disk.

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Doom was basically too big. Nowadays one could create something in Linux that sets up a ram disk and downloads it, but that wasn't feasible back in the day. You might be able to make a "stripped down" version that only runs e1m1 and e1m2 or something along those lines. Remove all the unused graphics and you might just be able to squeeze it in on a floppy.

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