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Phobos Anomaly

Usenet: First Usage of the Term "DOOM Slayer"!

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This is crazy. I was just perusing the old comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action through Google groups, curious what people had to say on the days following the release of Doom on December 10th, 1993...

 

I came across this post by "John F. Miller", posted the 11th of December, 1993 at 11:41 am EST. I do believe it is the earliest mention of the term "DOOMslayer"...Obviously the original poster had no idea what this term would come to mean in the year 2016:

 

 

        "ID your game is stupendous works GREAT on my 386/40
with 8meg of RAM. More importantly it does this with absolutely
NO changes to my auto and config files (and I have all the
usual Crap including SBPro 'ROM driver , NAV, AfterDark etc...)
not in high memory. Plus it's fast, faster even than Wolfie or
BS(one). All sounds and music are fine. I'm about 2/3 through
(on easy) and no bugs so far for me. The overall atmosphere and
feel are great. Plus it was *ON TIME* Great work guys. Now how
much credit is left on the old plastic...?
        I do have one thing to ask (beg). How about a wider
choice of character faces. I Know this sounds terribly PC but I
feel maybe there should at least be a female DOOMslayer. I've had
several ladies ask already.

        Kudos to you id
                -John"

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action/e4Me0PZ8sAI/XxscXlYWSJAJ

 

This just cracks me up.

 

Also, as a side note, it seems people were having a LOT of trouble getting the sound to work, both sfx and music. I noticed a lot of complaints about GUS compatibility. I wonder, is this the reason - or one of the reasons - that the sound code was completely re-written for v1.2 in February of '94?

 

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Yeah, they apparently had lots of problems with the DMX library, at least in early versions. Romero in particular posted some pretty disparaging things about the author of the library on Usenet - clearly they weren't very satisfied with it. Some of the bugs were never fixed, such as the GUS instrument mappings bug.

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11 minutes ago, fraggle said:

Yeah, they apparently had lots of problems with the DMX library, at least in early versions. Romero in particular posted some pretty disparaging things about the author of the library on Usenet - 

 

I assume that Paul Radek rewrote his own code for v1.2? Or did the other id guys do that? I can't find any more info about that.

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As far as I know, I think the id guys just used prebuilt versions of DMX provided by Radek. It would have been bugfixes rather than any kind of rewrite.

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fraggle, this might be a good opportunity to ask you this question regarding sound since I am coincidentally trying to fix this issue at the moment, and I couldn't find any info on the Chocolate Doom wiki:

 

I'm using the Native MIDI option, and I have CoolSoft VirtualMIDI Synth installed, but CD seems to be ignoring it and using some other midi soundfont. I've used the CoolSoft midi mapping feature to assign the Arachno soundfont for my system...both Vanilla DOOM on DOSBOX and DOOMRetro play using that soundfont, but no luck with Chocolate.

 

Any ideas?

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Quote

Also, as a side note, it seems people were having a LOT of trouble getting the sound to work, both sfx and music. I noticed a lot of complaints about GUS compatibility. I wonder, is this the reason - or one of the reasons - that the sound code was completely re-written for v1.2 in February of '94?

 

This is going back too far to remember specifics but for at least my first 2-3 years with Doom I was playing with either no sounds, no music, or both, depending on the machine. For at least a year I played using PC speaker sounds, I can still hear them easily in my memory. The most bizarre situation I ever came across was a computer my dad had brought home from his workplace which managed to play all the MIDI music back in a kind of odd, stuttering way (can't recall if it was OPL or GenMidi or what OS the machine was running) but simply refused to play anything but PC speaker sounds for the SFX, every other option was a no-go. The point of this little anecdote is that I'm not at all surprised to hear sound was a big issue for many players at the time, since it was as late as 1998 that my dad, brother and I finally experienced Doom with full audio fidelity. I assume it's because computers were simply expanding hardware/driver compatibility and whatever else pretty roundly at the time, but from Win98 on I never had any sound troubles with Doom.

 

Back to the point, John Miller was a visionary and should be credited as such!

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29 minutes ago, Jon said:

Female Doom Slayer: being requested for 25 years and counting.

 

Well I mean R63 exists in today's internet so it was pretty much entirely guaranteed that it would happen eventually:

 

doom_gal_sheet_by_fran.jpg

doom_gal_sheet_2_by_fran.jpg

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5 hours ago, Jimmy said:

 

Well I mean R63 exists in today's internet so it was pretty much entirely guaranteed that it would happen eventually:

 

doom_gal_sheet_by_fran.jpg

doom_gal_sheet_2_by_fran.jpg

I'll take her BFG if ya know what I mean (I'm very sorry).

 

To be serious though, I honestly wouldn't mind a female Doom Slayer. She would basically be Samus Aran but twice as badass.

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Incredible to learn that we still have traceable records of the reception the game received even a day and a half after it came out, almost 25 years ago (!!).

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