Odd memory of my first copy of doom.

[Submerge]

The very first copy of Doom I got (Shareware) had me real excited to play it. So excited, that I goofed up a bit and installed it to the directory c:\DOOMDOOM I think it's kinda funny, looking back at it. Anyone do anything similar?

[DOOM Anomaly]

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Lolz, yea, mines in "C:/ Doomsw" ahaahahahahaha..o wait.....thats not funny.....well...tis to me. :D

[dsm]

I don't remember if I did any such things, but what I DO remember is the trouble I had to go through to get Doom to work.
I can clearly remember that on the day I got my copy I was totally excited, my hands were shaking like crazy and I just couldn't wait for the installation to finish. Finally the installation was over and I hurried out to dos to launch the game.
With my eyes fixed on the screen, I watched as the (to me memorable line)'Init DOOM refresh Daemon.....' appeared on the screen.

And all of a sudden, the shit crashed, claiming that there was insufficient memory (I had 4 Mb RAM back then). I think I died and then got resurrected by an archie. I tried all sorts of memory freeing operations to get the damn game to work to no avail. I went through my dos manual looking through the memory management section, I looked through the readme file for Doom, none of the shit worked. It took about THREE months before my older brother figured out how to get the damn thing to work on our system (I think it was because of a program called 'smartdrive'). So, every time I wanted to play Doom 3, I had to edit autoexec.bat (I think) and add 'rem' in front of a few lines.

By then I had got SO used to seeing that damn 'insufficient memory' screen, that I had grown enormously pessimistic - I just though "Bah, it still won't work!"

...and then it made it to the Doom title screen and I swear, I have NEVER been so happy before (and never become as happy since).

[DOOM Anomaly]

heheh the reminds me of like 5 years ago, I was looking on DemonGate for a good wad to play, and I found one that sounded fun ("R".wad), so i clicked on it, and then I launched it, and it sat at the "Init DOOM Refresh Daemon..." and I sat there staring at the puter screen for 2 hours and 13 minutes waiting for it to load...Then I realized that my puter had froze, so I restarted the puter, and did it again...This happened to me for many wads on DemonGate...and note that I was about 7 at the time, so I wasnt very bright, just like nowadays :D

[Jello]

When I first got doom 2 (I got doom 2 before doom 1, so sue me) I had to hold down the right shift key while the computer was booting up, so it wouldn't load windows. I only had 4 megs of RAM, so this was the only way i could play it. I was pretty pissed when the mouse wouldn't work, then I finally figured out I had to put -mouse or someting like that after doom2. But I got it on a friday, and I had to go to my dads house in like an hour, so I couldn't play it all weekend...But I make up for that by playing it for a good 8 hours every week :)

[Torn]

Well, I also got doom2 first, I remember I died on the first of map02... heh. I could believe how real ("real") it was. It was cool
and it changed my life... :)

[Torn]

And I remember I got Doom shareware some months later, and played it like 100s of times. Imo, doom shareware is better than the whole doom2... :D

[Nanami]

All my Doom stuff is in C:\DoomServ (because I used to be a server when I did Legacy deathmatches with my friends). Legacy is installed here, and about 15 other Doom related folders are there (jDoom, ZDoom, um, I can't remember because I'm at school right now. Editors, extra effects, MD2 models, bots, nodes builders, SLIGE (I'm unimpressed by it, but keep it around for boredom), and lots of other junk). I have DeePsea setup to run C:\DoomServ\ZDoom\ZDoom.exe

[KoolKat]

I wasn't too good at installing stuff back then. Now that's hard for even me to believe! :)

[Kid Airbag]

Heh, When we got our old 486 back at the end of 93, the it came with a compilation of shareware games, among which was Doom. I never really gave it thought until New Years of 94, someone asked "What's this Doom thing all about?"

Never having played it, I loaded it up not knowing what to expect. I was 7 or 8 at the time, and consequently got the shit scared out of me at first, but soon I got the hang of it and managed to get all the way to E1M7 without dying on HMP on my first shot =)

Later that year, I bought registered Doom and my cousin bought Doom 2, we played them, then swapped. One of the funniest memories I have of Doom2 is when I got to Map02, I couldn't figure out how to cross the gap leading to the red key. I posted in newsgroups everywhere, and it was revealed to me that if I pressed shift, I would be able to run ^_^

[Spike]

I was kinda left out of the loop when it came to the pre-Doom hype. When i first saw an ad for it in a PC games mag, my first thoughts were :
'Meh, some shitty RPG. Ignored.'

Being the unobservant twat that i was at that age, i failed to notice the 'id' logo on the page - i had played 'Wolfenstein 3D' to death a few months before.

So then i pick up a copy of PC Format and read the review. I felt equally ashamed and amazed at the same time - just imagine the facial expressions...

[Nanami]

I still remember the first time I beat Wolfenstein. I was like "Woohoo!" Then eventually I moved on to Doom. The game scared me a lot. I always cheated. I NEVER played without IDDQD because I was too scared to be killed by the monsters. I eventually started playing without codes on the easy skill level. When I beat E1, I was amazed. Especially since it took me forever to get past the last level, and at that time I didn't know how to strafe. Monsters are SO much easier when you learn to strafe. I played and played and eventually was able to beat episodes 1-3 on UV (I've gotten to level 7 on episode 4 and quit playing. Episode 4 is hard!) I've never really played through Doom2, even though that's what I edit levels for. =/ The Arch-Viles are still scary. ^_^

[DOOM Anomaly]

Nanami said:

Especially since it took me forever to get past the last level, and at that time I didn't know how to strafe. Monsters are SO much easier when you learn to strafe.

hehe ya, I didn't actually start strife'ing until 2 years ago...before all that, I never used strife, it was too confusing, and I kept falling off edges when I attempted it. But now I'm exelent at strife'ing. :D

[dsm]

I didn't start using the 'strafe left' and 'strafe right' keys until...now when was it?...late 1995 I think. But I knew how to strafe, because like Spike, I was a Wolf3d veteran and at the time I was extremely good at strafing with the alt key.

It always make me chuckle that people found the two Barons at e1m8 hard when they first encountered them - sure, the got me by surprise the first time, but once I got over the initial surprise, I beat the crap out of them.
It makes a huge difference when you know how to strafe :-)
The Cybie, however, painted the walls with my internals a couple times before I got him.
And the spidey was an easy kill (though I did take quite a bit of damage the first time).

[edit]Now that I think about it, the Barons were easy because I had faced the cybie BEFORE the Barons - when I first tried Doom at my Brother's flat, I tried out some of his saved games (after I had played through a couple e1 levels) and one of them was at e2m8.

I think it took something like 4-5 tries to beat the cybie the first time.[/edit]

[Y2theJ]

Hmmm.... I remember pressing the shift keys on boot up for doom 1. And I also remember sweeeeeeeeeet wolf3D. Man no other games have ever stood out for me, when it comes to PC. I think from memory though that you could also press F4 or F5 or something like that on boot up. :P

[mmnpsrsoskl]

Um, when I first bought Doom 2 about 4 months ago, I droppped it after I walked outta the store.

When I first installed Doom shareware on our old PC 4 years ago, I put it in the Quake directory for some reason.

Despite buying Quake as my first PC game, I still think Doom is better.

Don't know why though...

[myk]

Nanami said:

When I beat E1, I was amazed. Especially since it took me forever to get past the last level, and at that time I didn't know how to strafe. Monsters are SO much easier when you learn to strafe.

I remember this happening to me. I'd reach the barons' room and run to the corner and stay there shooting with the chaingun (never the rocket launcher, I was too scared to blow myself up with it most of the time.) After many retries with savegames I managed to kill them. I can't remember the 1st time I did E1 on UV without saving but back then all I had was the shareware (I had had DOOM II as well earlier but I had lost it some time before this.) When I did complete it I thought that was so cool that I'd play it over and over. It's like each day I'd replay it doing each time practically the same movements. I was a keyboarder of course, and it took me about half an hour to complete the episode.

[Nanami]

dsm said:

The Cybie, however, painted the walls with my internals a couple times before I got him.

Oh boy, don't get me started on the Cyberdemon. It took me about a week to kill him. I finally decided that if I made a figure eight around two pillars and shot at him on each pass, he'd almost always miss since I'm running PAST him. When I learned how to strafe, it got easier. Nowdays I can stand about 10 feet from a Cyberdemon and strafe his rockets. I've killed Cyberdemons with a shotgun before. I made a wad a long time ago where that was the final level of E2M8--killing a Cyberdemon with just a shotgun. It was old and had horrible texture allignment, though, so it's gone now. Was fun to play. Took a very long time.

[DooMer 4ever]

I was also a keyboarder few years ago. I used to play E1 on im too young to die or hey not too rough. I usually didn't save when playing: I just played as long as I died: usually in E1M7 E1M8. So I never bothered to go through the whole episode. Well not until I learned to use mouse.

[Peter Heinemann]

My first contact with Doom was the MacDoom shareware in 1995.
Well, I played it on my Quadra 610, Motorola 68040 at 25mHz. I accelerated this Mac some months later to 48mHz (no - I did not overclock it, I just plugged an accelerator board in).
The shareware offered high-res mode, actually 3 modes: "Low detail", "medium detail" and "high detail".
Without the accelerator, I could play in low detail in half screen size, with the card "medium detail" and (almost) full-screen was possible.

[Lazer]

My Doom 1 got ejected, hit a wall and broke the floppy. This was before I had even finished E1.