Awesome Vanilla Doom Ideas

Making this thread about a couple of ideas I had to run the classic Vanilla Doom on our modern PC's.

1. Of course, DOSBox, but DOSBox lacks things like sound for some reason in Doom, so not the best and is still emulated.

2. Start a virtual PC with Win 95 or 98 and get the classic Doom .exe and play it. I think this would work best on Microsoft Virtual PC.

3. Create a MS-DOS boot disc pre-loaded with the classic Doom engine and shareware WAD, endless fun.

avery1555 said:

1. Of course, DOSBox, but DOSBox lacks things like sound for some reason in Doom, so not the best and is still emulated.

Sound works just fine for me in DOSBox, and I get the awesome classic music too.

avery1555 said:

2. Start a virtual PC with Win 95 or 98 and get the classic Doom .exe and play it. I think this would work best on Microsoft Virtual PC.

Probably will work fine, but DOSBox is a better solution because it is specifically tailored for games.

avery1555 said:

3. Create a MS-DOS boot disc pre-loaded with the classic Doom engine and shareware WAD, endless fun.

Many DOS games don't work on modern PCs, although I can't tell you whether Doom is one of these.

Most new PCs come with no floppy drive, and do new motherboards even have a floppy header? Maybe when you say disc you mean bootable optical media.

AFAIK Microsoft has not released MS-DOS as any kind of free software. That means you can not share a bootable disc made with MS-DOS with your friends, unless they also have a license to use MS-DOS.* It would be better to use FreeDOS IMHO.

* Note: I am not a lawyer, so ask a lawyer if you want a completely accurate statement on the legal status of MS-DOS.

sparerib1968 said:

Most new PCs come with no floppy drive, and do new motherboards even have a floppy header? Maybe when you say disc you mean bootable optical media.

Ummm, no. By "disc" I mean a compact disc or digital versatile disc, you can find bootable ISO images of MS-DOS here : http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/iso.html

And btw, it is not illegal to open up the floppy image of MS-DOS and add in applications and files, unless you redistribute it.

You could also download chocolate doom. Aside from extra features in the setup program if you don't touch those it's pretty much perfect vanilla doom. It's even getting a OPL emulator, for those who like the old OPL chip. (plus if you really want to go oldschool it supports the PC Speaker FX appearantly)

DOSBox is still the closest thing to "real" if you want to play on a modern PC. When Chocolate's OPL emulation is complete, it will be the best.

Any boot floppy image can be burnt to a bootable CD, but you still need drivers for mouse, sound, etc. Alot of more recent stuff doesn't have DOS drivers, and you'll never get original OPL3 sound out of a modern card.

You can do what Maes and I do and build old DOS boxes with ISA soundcards to play Doom on :P

Super Jamie said:

You can do what Maes and I do and build old DOS boxes with ISA soundcards to play Doom on :P

I used to do that, and still have a pile of ISA Sound Blaster cards here. Sadly there is no room in my place to set up another box.

DOSBox has gotten good enough for my needs by now anyway. I haven't found any DOS games yet that won't work on it, although some need more tweaking than others. Yeah, there are still games that don't work, but the compatibility list seems to be improving with each version.

avery1555 said:

btw, it is not illegal to open up the floppy image of MS-DOS and add in applications and files, unless you redistribute it.

You mean like that very site is doing? MS-DOS never shipped or booted from CD officially.

sparerib1968 said:

DOSBox has gotten good enough for my needs by now anyway. I haven't found any DOS games yet that won't work on it.

sadly i cant get carmageddon to work on it. it loads up fine, but when it asks for the game CD, it wont see it when i put it in.

Ultraboy94 said:

sadly i cant get carmageddon to work on it. it loads up fine, but when it asks for the game CD, it wont see it when i put it in.

Someone didn't read the readme. You have to mount the CD-ROM drive first. It is not automatic, unless you shove it at the end of dosbox.conf.

DOOM works fine in DOSBox with sound. Run SETUP.EXE first.
Virtual PC's DOS emulation is terrible. Badly emulated OPL3 FM is stuck in 11khz with timing issues and unavoidable input delays and screen update delays make it unfun.

It's just 1.4 mb floppy set-up's copied over to a cd. dos was bootable from floppy. it's mainly for floppy-less computers that up until just recently (again some are now including them standard) were absent or offered as an option.

Ive messed with dosbox and do have a game setup for it but i have a couple older box's right now, ones a win 3.1, and another win 98 for various useless things im still intereted in. though the 3.1 has an isa tv tuner card in it and i have it hooked up to cable and it works great, actually split between two tv tuner cards one of which of course is new in a more modern system.

Running doom retro is kinda neat still (but i still play it mostly in doomsday)

Duuuh...sounds like you're just trying too hard.

avery1555 said:

1. Of course, DOSBox, but DOSBox lacks things like sound for some reason in Doom, so not the best and is still emulated.

Or you just suck at setting it up properly (either DOSBox, or Doom, or both). Do SETUP.EXE and DOSBOX.conf ring any bells?

avery1555 said:

2. Start a virtual PC with Win 95 or 98 and get the classic Doom .exe and play it. I think this would work best on Microsoft Virtual PC.

You'll probably get much worse sound support this way than with DOSBOX. Then again it claims to emulate a SB 16 PnP, so you never know, but it's really more trouble than needed, compared with DOSBOx.

avery1555 said:

3. Create a MS-DOS boot disc pre-loaded with the classic Doom engine and shareware WAD, endless fun.

This is wrong on so many levels: Doom is too large to run off a floppy. It may run off a bootable CD-ROM (if you have the means to built it, you may be in for a surprise if you think it's as easy as building a bootable floppy) but then you won't be able to save and you must have everything preconfigured, as you won't be able to change keys/sound setup/controls etc, unless you also run a "virtual disk" manager on top of DOS so that it can simulate a writable disk using RAM.

It may work better off an USB key, but on a system that fully supports these methods of boot, chances are that you won't find many sound cards (mostly PCI ones) that will work with DOS and in a totally register-compatible Sound Blaster compatible mode, at least not without some heavy driver layering.

MS-DOS 6.2 and older may boot off a CD or USB if the BIOS allows for A: drive virtualization, but copyright issues aside, it's better to use something like FreeDOS: those old OSes have no wait states and will keep all CPUs in 100% occupancy all the time, thus straining the computer worse than any modern game would do.

Super Jamie said:

and you'll never get original OPL3 sound out of a modern card.

And out of many older ISA sound cards, too, as there were many different implementations of it and of its internal/external wiring. Let along that Doom only has OPL2 instrument definitions, so using an OPL3 will only result in stereo, double voices for some instruments, or even no difference at all, at it doesn't always get properly initialized.

Maes said:

Or you just suck at setting it up properly (either DOSBox, or Doom, or both). Do SETUP.EXE and DOSBOX.conf ring any bells?

I setup everything correctly, the damn thing just doesnt have any compatibility with this computers sound card, which I just got this pc two months ago. Unless your running something over 5 years old, I doubt you can get the sound to work.

But if anyone has any ways of getting the sound to work, please post it. It would make my life easier : D.

avery1555 said:

I setup everything correctly, the damn thing just doesnt have any compatibility with this computers sound card, which I just got this pc two months ago. Unless your running something over 5 years old, I doubt you can get the sound to work.

That's weird: DOSBox is a native Windows (or Linux) app, and the sound is ultimately output through Windows or Linux's drivers and sound system. If DOSBox doesn't work, then many other things mustn't work too.

What sound card you really have doesn't matter at all to DOS BOX, as long as it can output sampled sound. It doesn't have to be SB compatible at the hardware level, nor carry an OPL chip, as those are emulated anyway.

I hate stating the obvious, but could you post your system specs here? (CPU, OS, Sound card, GFX card, RAM etc.) and double-check whether you have installed the latest sound drivers (for the host OS, not for DOS)?

And also the relevant portions of the DOSBOX.conf file?

Maes said:

And also the relevant portions of the DOSBOX.conf file?

Why make life harder than it has to be?

Jodwin said:

Why make life harder than it has to be?

This may help him a bit, but IMHO he totally flunked the setup on the DOS part of the deal, too.

If you're running under Windows "DOS" with a modern soundcard, you'd be better to run VDMSound.

DOSBox is still a better solution. Arguably better even than DOS itself.

A virtual machine would have limited success. VirtualBox claims to emulate SB16, but crashes when any hardware OPL calls are made.

Super Jamie said:

If you're running under Windows "DOS" with a modern soundcard, you'd be better to run VDMSound.

avery1555 said:

1. Of course, DOSBox, but DOSBox lacks things like sound for some reason in Doom, so not the best and is still emulated.

;_; I didn't think that he might be trying to run Doom under a Windows DOS box rather than under DOSBox. That would explain a lot. Back to square one it is, then.

Maes said:

;_; I didn't think that he might be trying to run Doom under a Windows DOS box rather than under DOSBox. That would explain a lot. Back to square one it is, then.

No Im running it under the program DOSBox, not Windows DOSBox lol.

Does anyone have a configuration to run Doom on modern sound cards with it?

avery1555 said:

No Im running it under the program DOSBox, not Windows DOSBox lol.

Does anyone have a configuration to run Doom on modern sound cards with it?

Why don't you just set up DOSBox to emulate an 8-bit Sound Blaster with Address = 220
IRQ = 5
DMA =1

and then run Doom's SETUP.EXE (from within DOXBOX) and set it to the same parameters? It really isn't any harder than that. What about your system specs I asked before?

Maes said:

Why don't you just set up DOSBox to emulate an 8-bit Sound Blaster with Address = 220
IRQ = 5
DMA =1

and then run Doom's SETUP.EXE (from within DOXBOX) and set it to the same parameters? It really isn't any harder than that. What about your system specs I asked before?

System specs are...

3 GB Ram
640 GB SATA Hard Drive Space
AMD Phenom Triple-Core 2.2 GHZ Processor
ATI Radeon HD 3200 Video Card
Windows Vista Home Premium

[EDIT] Checking sound card, trying to find it.

I'll try what you said above and see if it works.

avery1555 said:

Does anyone have a configuration to run Doom on modern sound cards with it?

Here's an excerpt of the parts of my own .dosboxrc which are most relevant to the discussion. Of course you should tailor your config file to better suit your own system, and the other parts of the config are still important to running DOSBox properly.

# This is the configurationfile for DOSBox 0.72.
# Lines starting with a # are commentlines.
# They are used to (briefly) document the effect of each option.

[cpu]
# core -- CPU Core used in emulation: normal,simple,dynamic,auto.
#         auto switches from normal to dynamic if appropriate.
# cycles -- Amount of instructions DOSBox tries to emulate each millisecond.
#           Setting this value too high results in sound dropouts and lags.
#           You can also let DOSBox guess the correct value by setting it to max.
#           The default setting (auto) switches to max if appropriate.
# cycleup   -- Amount of cycles to increase/decrease with keycombo.
# cycledown    Setting it lower than 100 will be a percentage.

core=dynamic
cycles=auto
cycleup=500
cycledown=20

[mixer]
# nosound -- Enable silent mode, sound is still emulated though.
# rate -- Mixer sample rate, setting any devices higher than this will
#         probably lower their sound quality.
# blocksize -- Mixer block size, larger blocks might help sound stuttering
#              but sound will also be more lagged.
# prebuffer -- How many milliseconds of data to keep on top of the blocksize.

nosound=false
rate=22050
blocksize=2048
prebuffer=10

[midi]
# mpu401      -- Type of MPU-401 to emulate: none, uart or intelligent.
# device      -- Device that will receive the MIDI data from MPU-401.
#                This can be default,alsa,oss,win32,coreaudio,none.
# config      -- Special configuration options for the device. In Windows put
#                the id of the device you want to use. See README for details.

mpu401=intelligent
device=default
config=

[sblaster]
# sbtype -- Type of sblaster to emulate:none,sb1,sb2,sbpro1,sbpro2,sb16.
# sbbase,irq,dma,hdma -- The IO/IRQ/DMA/High DMA address of the soundblaster.
# mixer -- Allow the soundblaster mixer to modify the DOSBox mixer.
# oplmode -- Type of OPL emulation: auto,cms,opl2,dualopl2,opl3.
#            On auto the mode is determined by sblaster type.
#            All OPL modes are 'Adlib', except for CMS.
# oplrate -- Sample rate of OPL music emulation.

sbtype=sb16
sbbase=220
irq=7
dma=1
hdma=5
mixer=true
oplmode=auto
oplrate=22050

[gus]
# gus -- Enable the Gravis Ultrasound emulation.
# gusbase,irq1,irq2,dma1,dma2 -- The IO/IRQ/DMA addresses of the 
#            Gravis Ultrasound. (Same IRQ's and DMA's are OK.)
# gusrate -- Sample rate of Ultrasound emulation.
# ultradir -- Path to Ultrasound directory.  In this directory
#             there should be a MIDI directory that contains
#             the patch files for GUS playback.  Patch sets used
#             with Timidity should work fine.

gus=true
gusrate=22050
gusbase=240
irq1=5
irq2=5
dma1=3
dma2=3
ultradir=C:\ULTRASND

[speaker]
# pcspeaker -- Enable PC-Speaker emulation.
# pcrate -- Sample rate of the PC-Speaker sound generation.
# tandy -- Enable Tandy Sound System emulation (off,on,auto).
#          For auto Tandysound emulation is present only if machine is set to tandy.
# tandyrate -- Sample rate of the Tandy 3-Voice generation.
# disney -- Enable Disney Sound Source emulation. Covox Voice Master and Speech Thing compatible.

pcspeaker=true
pcrate=22050
tandy=auto
tandyrate=22050
disney=true

Note that I do have the patch files installed at C:\ULTRASND (that's DOSBox's emulated C drive) because I like it better that way.

DOSBox 0.73 is the current version, and you may have better results with it than trying to use 0.72 with my settings.

www.dosbox.com says:
* Support for more graphics modes and cards.
* Improved Vista support.
* New OPL emulation cores.
* Sound fixes and improvements for Mac OS X.
* Lots of compatibility fixes.
* Lots of cdrom detection improvements.
* Lots of memory (EMS/XMS) improvements.
* Various fixes and enhancements for the recompiling core.
* Support for evdev.
* Lots of DOS fixes.
* Slightly faster!
* More stable.

I was about to post my own .conf file too, but then I thought it would be better to wait and see that:

1. The guy has working sound drivers on Vista, or even an actual soundcard on his computer (no positive input on this one, yet)
   
2. Understands the nature and purpose of DOSBox. From his continuous mentioning "compatibility with new sound cards", I think he doesn't.
   
3. He understands how to find and edit DOSBox.conf, and also how to setup Doom when running under DOSBox. So far, I only take that he has installed DOSBOx and nothing more.
   
4. Has an understanding of what "setting up sound" for a DOS game means. Aka, understanding Addresses, IRQs, DMA channels etc. or at least the BLASTER variable.
   

Maes, you are right of course. I do think we need to know more about his setup before offering specific advice.

Honestly though, getting sound working in DOSBox is far, far easier than it ever was in MS-DOS.

sparerib1968 said:

Honestly though, getting sound working in DOSBox is far, far easier than it ever was in MS-DOS.

Selecting GUS sound without owning one was priceless for me :-D

I highly doubt its hardware then I guess, I just must be doing something wrong. -.-

Fuck it, I'll play ZDoom.

Well...I could put my DOSBOX.conf and default.cfg files for download, but I'd like to see yours first (default.cfg is in Doom's directory, and contains all config information).

Just out of curiosity...have you ever set up the sound in a DOS game before? For that matter, have you ever used real vanilla Doom (aka not on an emulator?) Ever owned a real DOS machine?

Hey, getting sound working in MS-DOS is a breeze when you don't have a sound card. I literally went years playing Doom with just the PC speaker sound effects. Ah, I miss that old machine.

Maes said:

Just out of curiosity...have you ever set up the sound in a DOS game before? For that matter, have you ever used real vanilla Doom (aka not on an emulator?) Ever owned a real DOS machine?

Yeah my first pc was a dos machine with a couple games including Doom Shareware and Cosmos Cosmic Adventures (I know -.-).

I'll post my config files and that soon just going to eat.

EDIT : YAY I got the sound working!

avery1555 said:

EDIT : YAY I got the sound working!

Care to share with us what the silver bullet was? So that it can be added in mankind's infinite library of knowledge.

Maes said:

Care to share with us what the silver bullet was? So that it can be added in mankind's infinite library of knowledge.

Lol, I'll sound like a moron.

I just re-configured the setting through DOSBox rather then MS DOS.