doom with thumbs

[Xaser]

A product of boredom and random, doom with thumbs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E72vOD-IEd4

I had the weird idea not too long ago to set up a DOS machine (for gaming purposes, naturally). For whatever reason, I was also looking at Eee PCs, so I mashed the ideas together and snagged a 701SD to transform into my mobile retro gaming platform (yay buzzwords).

Took me long enough, but I finally got the thing to dual-boot Linux and FreeDOS yesterday and decided to record something as a victory moment. It runs Doom and the keys are small enough to allow using thumbs-only, so I went with that. And here you have it.

For the record, the game is running in DOS. I'm only using Doom Legacy because it's what shipped with FreeDOS (along with an interesting old FreeDoom build) and I don't have the original .exes handy at present. I'll get those set up soon enough though so any future demos won't be considered TAS. :P

So, anyone else tried this? I know the run is pretty shitty (especially the recording quality -- stupid webcam and Xaserhair) but it's a start in case anyone's crazy enough to want to see any more of this. For now, comments commence.

[Guest]

Awesome.

I loved the blurred, hyper look of the screen. I assume this is a combination of webcammage and processing power, but it gave everything a really retro look, like Doom meets old 70's episodes of the Six Million Dollar Man, or like the Millenium Falcon about to launch into hyperspace, or something.

Whenever you sprinted forwards and everything went blurry, I almost wanted to hear that tacky "t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t" sound that accompanied the bionic man whenever he was using his bionic abilities.

Good stuff! Made me grin watching this.

[Never_Again]

Running Legacy kind of defeats the idea of setting up a DOS box. The shareware on /idgames has DOOM.EXE v1.9 that is bit-identical to DOOM2.EXE v1.9; Ladopato got the Ultimate DOOM and the Final DOOM execs.
Edit: and don't waste time and space webcamming DOOM. Dosbox's built-in video grabber works perfectly (example). Just be sure to resize the Dosbox's output to 960x720@Lanzcos3 before encoding, so that YT recognizes your video as HD. Otherwise it will be raped and look as hideous as the webcam grab.

[Mr. T]

Thanks for your amazing insight. Now go and capture video from Dosbox on an EEEpc and show us how easy and silky smooth it is.

[HackNeyed]

What's with the DOSBox chatter? He is running the game from a local install of FreeDOS. A DOS clone. Doom won't run very well from DOSBox on an eeePC I can vouch for that as I tried it with my 901 model with a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom in Windows XP.

PrBoom-Plus runs well enough though, you can checkout my benchmarks and the test demos a few posts up by entryway.

So Xaser, congrats on getting FreeDOS and Linux on there. I never could get FreeDOS to install from USB. Quick question though, does it have any sound drivers? I never found anyone who could say they had sound working in FreeDOS on the eeePC. No sound kind of kills it for me.

[Xaser]

I actually couldn't get the FreeDOS install (the full LiveCD one, since that's what I needed) to work from a USB drive, so I 'cheated' and borrowed an external USB DVD/R drive that booted a burned LiveCD nicely. Partitioning it was the most annoying part, since Eee PCs are already split up into four partitions: one for the OS, one for user data, and two really odd ones that are apparently a recovery partition and a segment used for their "BootBooster" feature (the first thing I had to disable, seeing how it actually skipped over nearly all the portion of booting that allowed you to enter the setup screen. @_@). I had to nuke one of them to continue -- can't remember which one, either, but it wound up working just fine in the end.

Unfortunately there's no sound, but I figured that would be the case in the beginning so it wasn't too much of a shocker. There's allegedly one guy working on a driver for the sound chip the Eee's use, but it currently doesn't support existing DOS programs yet (which, I must say, is 99% of the whole reason for having one :P).

@Never: Thanks for the Ladopato link -- I'm not sure if I even ever used a Final Doom .exe, since I got it from the Collector's Edition disc which used Doom95 for everything (although it would've been silly for them not to include the original executables on the CD anyway -- nevertheless, I don't have the disk with me right now). Anyhow, they all run fine in all their DOS-y glory. Now I'm tempted to nab DeHackEd and start mucking around with things again... :P

At any rate, I got a bunch of other games installed successfully. Blood runs like a dream now (much moreso than it ever did in DOSBox), so I'm certainly putting the other flagship Build games on my list. Probably won't take me long to fill up all the remaining space... :P

[PRIMEVAL]

lawl ** creative you are.

[ReFracture]

Very nice. Hopefully a good sound driver gets released eventually.

I want to get one of these things.

[Super Jamie]

I used to do the same on my GP2X.

Though the port of PrBoom 2.5.0 is screwed and I have no idea how to fix it. The older 2.2 version still works fine.