Home Doom Station

Since I'm going to be moving out of my house some time next year, I've already decided that at least one of the rooms (probably the basement) in my house is going to be restricted to home Dooming.

I haven't yet bought anything, I'm still hypothesizing how I'm gonna handle this, but I've considered the possibility of running a LAN server with four cheap office computers that basically have their drive wiped of everything except for the Doom IWADs and Odamex. Additionally with an external hard drive jampacked with every wad I can get my mouse cursor on.

The layout of the room will have a table in one corner, with the four PCs and and external harddrive under it. a 70 inch widescreen TV on top, (My brother who works at Ed's TV would be able to get me a deal on that) with the PCs connected to the TV under seperate video modes, and configured to have a PIP (picture in picture) setting akin to four player split-screen. There will be four chairs surrounding the TV, each with a keyboard at each one (every friend I invite over to play doom will have to learn to play keyboard only, or alternatively with some sort of joystick or gamepad)

Im not quite sure how I will establish the sound, I'd like to get some high quality sound system so all the guns' soundfx sound really amplified and strong, but I'm hoping the sound from each PC doesn't conflict with each other somehow. I found a bunch of PCs on ebay for $40 a pop. I'm thinking about getting one and seeing how reliable it is at running Doom and Doom only. If all goes well I'll move on to buy a few more to get this set up. I've also got a friend of mine who is as in love with Doom as I am and studied C++ the past couple years and might be interested in creating some kinda "Doom Operating System" as he so calls it. It will probably just be a Doom launcher or something though, but nonetheless if he keeps it simple I'll use that too.

The idea is to be able to set up this thing so that I can have a few friends over for some good old-fashioned dooming. Deathmatch, Cooperative, Capture the Flag, etc. And of course when no one wants to play I can play single player with the sound turned all the way up on a 70 inch widescreen TV. I'd fuckin love that.

40oz said:

I've also got a friend of mine who is as in love with Doom as I am and studied C++ the past couple years

Perhaps your friend could work on Odamex?

40oz said:

(probably the basement)

Well what else would a basement be used for?

Clonehunter said:

Well what else would a basement be used for?

Being flooded every five years? That's all mine have ever been good for.

Vulture said:

Perhaps your friend could work on Odamex?

That's if he can stay out of trouble. The time he spent learning C++ was in jail.

40oz said:
The time he spent learning C++ was in jail.

Sounds like a cruel and unusual punishment.

I'd turn the music off on all but one system; thinking back to the times my friends and I piled our computers into one of our basements, it was really annoying to have an OPL3 or two and various early wavetable cards all slightly out of sync with each other.

I keep thinking of building a stripped-down Linux distribution solely for playing Doom that could boot off of a USB drive or even over the network. If you have a lack of hard drives, I suppose something along those lines could be an option...