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mike-db

Getting back to the classic!

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Hey all,I'm Mike!

I've been playing Doom (1&2) since I was five years old, I'll never forget this game.

Anyways, I just received a free laptop (IBM Thinkpad T42p) and Doom 2 seems to be laggish/low framerate when it comes to fighting anything (first level, going against two basic soldiers it was lagging) what I'm wondering is why?

I know I'm limited because of the fact that it is a laptop but I'd love to be able to play Doom on campus when waiting between classes. What's up? Any suggestions?

I feel that this would be a great time for me to get back into making WADS, I really want this to work!

Thanks in advance,
-Mike-DB

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Well, how do you play it? Do you just play Doom.exe/Doom2.exe directly or do you use a port? If you play the Doom.exe for DOS directly under Windows XP/Vista/7 that might cause a few various problems.

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In my experience, laptops are pretty much garbage and the fact that it was free isn't saying a lot in its favor. Thats awesome that you're getting back into doom though. I recently introduced a girl I'm close friends with to Doom and she thought it was really gonna suck but she really likes it now and got all the way to E1M6 on Doom 1.

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Definitively ain't garbage, I've finished Absolution and Hell Revealed in OpenGL on a similarly specced laptop (although mine had a Mobility Radeon IGP320).

What port are you using that chokes on vanilla levels? What OS and drivers are you using? I don't know what graphics card you have in there, but you could try some more updated drivers for one, or use a non-GL port (if it doesn't have actual hardware T&L, OpenGL can slow things down instead of helping).

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I know for a fact that the laptop is not garbage, it was previously owned by my father. Computer Guru and the person whom introduced me to Doom.

Yes I was just running it from doom2.exe I have always ran it this way. I will look more into ports later on, I will have more questions.

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If you want to play Doom2.exe straight up, that's cool... But more modern PCs using XP or up I haven't found to be very DOS friendly. The only solution I know is to get a DOS emulator, this one in particular, witch I found to run many games very well with no issues. But using a Doom Port is a better idea, especially if you're looking to play more WADS and Mods.

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mike-db said:

Yes I was just running it from doom2.exe


There's your killer. This way of "running" Doom -if it works at all under XP, it seems to depend a lot on the hardware and the service pack level- is unreliable, buggy and slow. There are so many potential problems and conflicts that they're not worth listing -though some people will claim that they always run it "perfectly" and "with no problems" this way under "windows" (leaving a lot of details to be filled-in).

It would actually run smoother inside a DOS emulator like DOSBox, or you could simply move on to a modern source port.

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If a 386 can play Doom you can play it on said laptop. It's most likely slow due to slow screen refreshes, background tasks, sound emulation, etc.. I believe if you try to use sound blaster at all, i've known it to be super slow if it even works for you.

There's Chocolate Doom if you want some vanilla-like stuff, it's too bad fraggle refuses to support DOS, it's not dead (just like 98)!

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GhostlyDeath said:

If a 386 can play Doom you can play it on said laptop. It's most likely slow due to slow screen refreshes, background tasks, sound emulation, etc.. I believe if you try to use sound blaster at all, i've known it to be super slow if it even works for you.


What's more, Doom is one of the games that's "resistant" to even VDMSound, which otherwise allows you to run stuff like Need for Speed or Cyberbykes (sic) at full native speed and WITH SOUND.

Getting soundblaster sound depends on the sound card you have (some AC'97 are actually SB Pro compatible/Ensoniq derivatives) so they might work directly with some stuff under pure DOS or Windows 9x, but under XP banging on the hardware directly in that way is restricted.

The very least you'll get a laggy IRQ conflict hell, and it will interfere with the "Dos box" SB emulation too -I was surprised to hear that the standard NTVDM Dos Box is supposed to have Sound Blaster emulation, however it works none too good, and does not emulate FM sound-.

TL; DR: if you're serious about keeping playing Doom move to a source port. If you want to just keeping complaining on how XP ruined classic games, do nothing.

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AveryMaurice said:

ZDoom, GZDoom and prBoom are probably some of the best ports to look into, or Skulltag for its simplicity.


Can you explain what you mean by this?

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mike-db said:

Now to start me some WAD's. :)


;-)

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AveryMaurice said:

Skulltag for its simplicity.


Skulltag is not simple at all and is the complete opposite of it, if you want simple the lowest you could go is DOSDoom, the first port of Doom.

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Ralphis said:

Can you explain what you mean by this?

I mean how when you install it, it automatically integrates wad files and such so for a newbie, all you really need to do is double click what you want to play.

I'm not talking about the functionality of the port itself.

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Well, conveniently for me it also has both G/ZDoom renderers in one and dynamics can be enabled or turned off when in hardware mode, versus having to drag 'n drop lights.pk3 on GZDoom. The Skins folder is also a convenient way to load multiple PWADs and like AveryMaurice said it converts PWADs into quick loads, for the ST port anyway. And there's the multiplayer if anyone cares for it, I haven't lately though.

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