The best classic Doom Experience.

Im curious what Doom veterans consider to be the best Doom port.

The best Doom port is whichever suits your playstyle the most.

DOSBox with KEYBOARD ONLY

(Nah joking, just what @SteelPH said)

Yeah, it's subjective. There are many ports which have their own pros and cons depending on what you're looking for. I hadn't ever used Eternity until recently and it's probably my favorite now, but that's because I'm a bit of a purist and I like that its genealogy can be traced back directly (LinuxDoom Src --> Boom --> MBF --> SMMU --> Eternity). Also, Cardboard renderer.

Eternity probably isn't the best suggestion for someone just starting out tho. For that I'd say probably GZDoom. I'd say it's the most user friendly, and it's how I entered the scene, so to speak.

for me, it's prboom+

I'm generally a Classic Doom player, but I do have days where the original 320x200 resolution feels a little uncomfortable — 1993's Doomguy could've used some glasses. So "vanilla-like" ports with a default internal resolution of 640x400 are my go-to, like Crispy Doom or Doom Retro. It's still low-res enough that it feels right, but it gives me a better chance of actually identifying stuff at far distances.

PRBoom+ is still the best purist port for playing a wide range of wads with Doom's classic gameplay in mind. GZDoom is king for gameplay mods or maps using advanced features. Other ports have their niches and quirks but the two above have the largest content coverage.

You can also try DOOM BFA Classic Edition. In concept it's similar to the new Unity ports but instead of Unity it uses DOOM 3 BFG's Engine. It quite close to the original game with some optional additions like freelook.

GZdoom and PrBoom+ cover 99.9% of the classic doom content.

22 hours ago, SteelPH said:

The best Doom port is whichever suits your playstyle the most.

The one and only answer.

As for me, I prefer PrBoom, Eternity, and GZDoom. They fit everything I want to play.

PrBoom+ by defaults emulates, well, Boom, remember to run it with -complevel 2 or 3

I personally don't like PrBoom+ all that much, in no small part becuase its sound engine is a bit bad. My goto for "Vanilla Doom-ish" is Crispy Doom. Depending on how nostalgic I'm feeling I can turn its various enhancements on and off. If you turn all enhancements off you end up with Chocolate Doom without the vanilla bugs and crashes. It's pretty great.

Alternatively for classic doom I would just stick with GZDoom and use Vanilla Essence, tune it to your liking. Try a few enhancements with Smooth Doom. It's pretty great.

Whichever way you go I highly recommend you check out the Gameplay Enhancements page on the Chocolate Doom wiki. The Sprite Fixing Project and High Resolution Doom Sound Effects Pack are absolute must have for *any* sourceport. Be sure to put them in the autoload of whatever doom port you will be using.

It's a personal thing, but I would actually encourage you to try chocolate doom or dos(box) doom (they're interchangeable) atleast once. Doom's gameplay is surprisingly captivating even with its 1994 restrictions. There's something special about experiencing Doom like people who downloaded the shareware in 1993 experienced it. Atleast, I find it interesting, as someone who was less then a year old when Doom 1 was released :P

On PC I tend to use Doom Retro, it might not be a "purist" classic experience, but none of its additions offend my delicate sensibilities like PrBoom/ZDoom's additions do, for whatever reason. There are a few annoying features like the screen shake that I've had disabled for so long, I forget they're a part of the default experience, though.

I've always said that consoles actually had the best classic experience since the Xbox 360 port of Doom II. Classic gameplay in higher resolution out of the box with decent controls. The new ports are even better, now that they've been updated and have add on support, and are definitely my favorite way to play. Great in-game level select and cheat menus, last I checked only Eternity comes anywhere close to this user experience, and that's only for the Master Levels. I just wish they'd bring back the X360 directional weapon switching, what they have now is a total regression.

We really do need an official port with true, aspect corrected widescreen support, though. At least they gave us the 4:3 option in the new ports but it's pretty sad that vanilla Doom could have a larger field of view using multiple PCs and monitors in 1993 but we can't have the game fill our TVs in 2020!

You should try out either RUDE or SO DOOM.

On 3/6/2020 at 8:53 PM, Dragonsbrethren said:

We really do need an official port with true, aspect corrected widescreen support, though.

It's already available in Crispy Doom and its fork So Doom :)