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I_Am_Doom_Man

What was the best hardware available for Doom in 1994?

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I've been contemplating trying to build a period accurate pc from the era that doom came out. I'm eyeing doing a build with an Intel DX4-100 as they came out in march of that year as well as a proper sound blaster card, but I'm still researching what all components I need. I don't think anything from that year truly ran Doom the best, but I like the idea of having the limitation. I was just hoping I could get some ideas on other components I might need since I'm not the most familiar with that era of computing. Ideally it would be cool if I could get everything as old new stock, though could be expensive, just to know it's fresh for years of use.

Edited by I_Am_Doom_Man

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You can try to find better a PC from 1998 or 1999, and will also help you to run games from 1998 and backwards.

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3 minutes ago, D4NUK1 said:

You can try to find better a PC from 1998 or 1999, and will also help you to run games from 1998 and backwards.

I contemplated that, but funnily enough ha I plan I recreating my first gaming build which was an emachines from 2003 with an amd athlon and a radeon 9600 pro. With Windows XP that should do mid to late 90s gaming just fine.

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2 hours ago, I_Am_Doom_Man said:

I contemplated that, but funnily enough ha I plan I recreating my first gaming build which was an emachines from 2003 with an amd athlon and a radeon 9600 pro. With Windows XP that should do mid to late 90s gaming just fine.

There's a fair few DOS games that are going to have issues with XP. If you're going to the trouble of building a 90's machine, I would probably suggest Windows 98SE.

 

I remember switching to XP from ME (yeah, laugh it up. It's what came with the PC) in 2004 and it was irritating getting older games to run. Usually I could find patches and work-arounds, but I doubt that most of them still exist 18 years later.

 

Just my two cents though, it's your project. And I guess you could always dual boot, but either way, you're probably going to want 98 on it.

 

 

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2 hours ago, Jello said:

There's a fair few DOS games that are going to have issues with XP. If you're going to the trouble of building a 90's machine, I would probably suggest Windows 98SE.

 

I remember switching to XP from ME (yeah, laugh it up. It's what came with the PC) in 2004 and it was irritating getting older games to run. Usually I could find patches and work-arounds, but I doubt that most of them still exist 18 years later.

 

Just my two cents though, it's your project. And I guess you could always dual boot, but either way, you're probably going to want 98 on it.

 

 

 

Thanks for the input. Personally I think after doom came out there was a clear separation in pc gaming from the dos era to the 3d acceleration era which is what my emachines build I alluded to would encompass.

Edited by I_Am_Doom_Man

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15 hours ago, I_Am_Doom_Man said:

I don't think anything from that year truly ran Doom the best

Very few people had them at the time, but the Socket 4 Pentium 60 and 66 was out.  When checking my memory I found a blog where someone did build such a period accurate machine: https://ancientelectronics.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/socket-4-the-cutting-edge-of-1993/

 

Since you're looking at 1994 that would open up Socket 5.

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14 hours ago, I_Am_Doom_Man said:

 

Thanks for the input. Personally I think after doom came out there was a clear separation in pc gaming from the dos era to the 3d acceleration era which is what my emachines build I alluded to would encompass.

That's understandable, if you're more targeting the early 3D accelerated games then XP should be just fine. I was thinking more along the lines of Build games like Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood. I had a hell of a time getting Blood to run on XP, and even when I did finally get it running, it never felt quite right.

 

Although now we have pretty reliable source ports for running those, so it's far less of an issue than it was back in 2004. I was more saying go with 98 in the interest of playing them in DOS as they were originally intended. 

 

As far as my OG Doom PC, it was a Tandy, Intel 486, 33mhz. Originally had 4mb RAM, upgraded to 8mb. Pretty sure it had a Sound Blaster card, but I wasnt very old, so I can't recall exactly. Windows 3.1. It played Doom, although you did have to boot directly to DOS before the extra RAM was added.

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