wads for potatos?

What are some wad reccomendations that can run on crap hardware?

...Pretty much anything from the 90's and 00's? And, I imagine, most stuff from the 10's, except maybe for very large/detailed levels, or overly complex GZDoom mods.

The Top 100 Wads list at https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Top_100_WADs_of_All_Time is a great starting point, and the very early ones will certainly be old hardware-friendly :)

Thats depends on the sourceport you are using.

GZDoom is pretty much the standar entrypoint for most people, but it really needs a powerfull computer to run the most advanced wads and a lot of the gameplay mods out there. LZDoom is a good choice if you want to try a sourceport with almost all the advanced features but designed for low end computers.

If you only want to play good wads and don't care for all that fancy dynamics lights and most gamplay mods, you can try PrBoom+, the most flexible sourceport that adds high resolution and some graphic tinkering without soo much resources consumption. Its by no mean anything near of what ZDoom family of sourceport can offer in the graphic departent, but it is still the port of choice of almost everyoe here, specially for the option to record demos. In this port you can't play ZDoom specifics wads.

If you want to go to the retro side, MY side, i really recommend you to try Doom Retro, it compatibility with almost anything out there, except for ZDoom specific wads and gameplay mods. Doom Retro also has the best of tboth worlds, you can play modern megawads like Eviternity, one of the finest works of the last years, an play it in the old good fashion of low resolution like 320x240, the resolution of the original DOS Doom.

Aside from that, the link @DavidN put on his post, practically cover the entry point to try marvellous megawads. You can also check this:

https://www.doomworld.com/10years/bestwads/

there you will find interesting review of all the most beloved megawads of the community.

If you don't know what you can play on your sourceport, just check at the description and follow this rule:
Vanilla Doom > limit-removing > Boom-compatible > zdoom

If a wad said it is for vanilla doom, you can play it in any sourceport, if it said in limit removing, you can play it anywhere except for the original DOS Doom and Chocolate Doom, a port that lets you play the original doom as it was made back then in modern PCs.
If it said Boom Compatible, you can only play it in a source port with Boom compatibility, like, Doom Retro, PrBoom+, and ZDoom family of ports.

If it said ZDoom, well, its only for ZDoom and no other port might play it right.
More to the left, you can play it anywhere, the more you go to the right, you can only play it in specific ports.

Hope this helps you.

thanks for the replies they definitely help. i didn't realize that doom retro can play eviternity, i probably did something wrong when i tried to load it

Any vanilla compatible wads are bound by the same limitations id Software designed for PCs in 1993, so must should work absolutely fine on modern hardware.

In the Downloads section / id Games archive if you go to the Levels / Doom 2 (or Doom 1) folder, everything in there except anything in the "Ports" section will be vanilla compatible and is pretty much guaranteed to run on anything.

34 minutes ago, jeroa said:

thanks for the replies they definitely help. i didn't realize that doom retro can play eviternity, i probably did something wrong when i tried to load it

you can use Doom Retro built-in launcher or set it via .bat files that are somewhat executables.

Put Doom2.wad, Doom.wad, TNT. wad or Plutonia.wad in the same folder as Doom Retro, create a .txt, rename it (name pwad).bat, right click it, select EDIT and put as follow:
start doomretro.exe -iwad doom2.wad -file (pwad name).wad

exit

Save it and now the .bat file will load Eviternity, or the wad you want, instantly, without the need to search for it with the Doom Retro built-in launcher.

Anything that's not for GZDoom only. If i ever find Boom map which crawls too slow, i switch to 320x200 resolution. Normally i always play on 640x400 (correctly stretched on 4:3 screen). Eternity Engine (Boom and MBF compatible, so supports Eviternity) is using advanced Software Renderer (Cardboard), performance is much more stable than in PrBoom+ 2.5.1.4 for me.

Well it's hard to think nowadays people is playing doom on a pentium III, but, as far as I can tell, you can run Boom on a two core CPU Notebook, as long as you run it on Software, without VSync, anything "Boom-compatible" would run fine, but be careful of wads which present many monsters or bigger maps. Technically NUTS.WAD is a Vanilla map, but it won't work on a bad computer anyways.
If you are not sure, just download Crispy Doom or Chocolate Doom and play only Vanilla or Limit Removing maps.

Not that we can give you more help anyways, since you didn't specify your system information.

unless your running a Commodore Vic 20 you should be able to run vanilla maps

I was hoping for potato themed wads. Thoroughly disappointing.

A potato gun would be great.