Why not Doom95?

[Karnizero]

I would like to know some oppinions about this source port, Doom95.

I read here and there that this is a shitty port with lots of bugs, poor of features and so, but I remember that my first non-shareware Doom experience was Plutonia Experiment (i had the original CD with Plutonia and TNT, and with Doom95) when it was released.

I enjoyed it a lot, even when i did play with keyboard only, and finally finish the game, playing also with my father, in 1996 or 97, and i enjoyed more Doom95 than Shareware Doom when i played it.


So, i would like to know if someone still find this port quite interesting to play Doom.exe Maps or just Chocolate/Boom/PrBoom is what everyone does.

[printz]

Because

Karnizero said:

i did play with keyboard only,

[Vermil]

Taken by it'self, it's a largely fine port. It's just that it's been completely supassed by modern ports.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Vermil said:

Taken by it'self, it's a largely fine port. It's just that it's been completely supassed by modern ports.

Yeah, pretty much this. Doom95's biggest draw was its higher resolution support, which is still lower than what modern ports allow, and it introduced its own share of bugs/incompatibilities.

I'm sure it was a great alternative to the DOS exes back in '96/97, but there's little point to using it nowadays.

[Grazza]

Doom 95 cannot be used with dehacked patches, and was poorly supported by later versions of Windows. It also introduces demo incompatibilities by always using Ultimate Doom behaviour (in modern terms -complevel 3).

Those who want its (minor) improvements over vanilla are better served by ports (or Doom[2]+), while those who want true vanilla might as well use Dosbox.

[Porsche Monty]

No reason to use this port at all, nearly everything is better. If missing like half the weapon sprite does not immediately discourage you, chances are that you'll get a kick out of it, at least for the retro factor.

[Wagi]

Doom95 had a ton of missing features and bugs.

- Valid savegames would sometimes randomly crash on startup.
- Marking a spot on the automap is completely broken and can cause HOM or sometimes crashes.
- None of the screen resolutions looked correct. 320x200 and 640x400 had distorted and cutoff weapons. 320x240 and 640x480 had everything squished vertically.
- All of the sound effects played at a lower pitch, for some reason.
- Certain Doom2 demos went out of sync when played back with Doom95 (probably due to lost souls)
- Any time you launched a game with the intent to record a demo, the game would instantly terminate.
- Apparently mouse support on Doom95 was broken for a vast majority of users.
- No way to apply DeHackEd patches.
- IIRC you could only add one wad at a time.
- Screen wipes took unbearably long at higher resolutions.

The original DOS executable was superior to Doom95 in pretty much every way.

[Quasar]

Wagi said:

Doom95 had a ton of missing features and bugs.

Though to be fair a few of the things you are talking about are limitations or bugs in the graphical launch shell, and will not apply if you run the executable from a command prompt.

[4mer]

Wagi said:

IIRC you could only add one wad at a time.

If there was one thing I learnt about Doom95 while messing with it, it was how to add more than one wad at a time:

doom95.exe -basewad doom2.wad -nodm -warp 1 -skill 5 -file hr.wad hrmus.wad

[Never_Again]

To add to Wagi's list:
- no autorun like "joyb_speed 29" in vanilla
- cannot handle even minor cases of Medusa - bombs out on sight with no error message

Corrections:
- demo recording has been fixed for a good ten years now
- mouse support was fixed last year

Still useless without autorun. I used to root for Doom95 ten years ago, but even then it was evident that it was getting long in the tooth.

Karnizero said:

and i enjoyed more Doom95 than Shareware Doom

Doom95 is a source port, Shareware Doom is a collection of levels. I don't see how you can even begin to compare the two. Not to mention that in the mid-to-late 90s DOOM shareware often came with the Doom95 engine, not the DOS execs.

[SaladBadger]

Never_Again said:

Doom95 is a source port, Shareware Doom is a collection of levels. I don't see how you can even begin to compare the two.

That reminds me of people I know who love comparing "Apple to Windows" and "Microsoft to Linux"

On topic, I once tried using Doom 95, really just to see what it is actually like, but I wasn't able to get it working at the time, and I never bothered to fix it. Is there any point?

[Never_Again]

Are those the same people that call an iPod "MP3"? I think I know the type. ;)

The only advantages that Doom95 had over vanilla are high res (albeit distorted), the neat (albeit limited) launcher and the cheat codes exclusive to it. Except for the launcher, it has nothing most of today's ports cannot do (and do much better at that).

[EarthQuake]

Yeah, I used to be all fanboy with Doom 95 about 7 years ago when I first started frequenting the internet. Then I discovered that pretty much every source port was superior, or that the things that made Doom 95 unique, weren't that important to begin with. I do miss the launcher though, because it made network games really easy to set up. But that's about it.

[myk]

I became more aware of Doom95 rather late and (thus) never really got into it. By then, ports were around, although I've been a purist sticking to vanilla for the bulk of play (especially single player). From my point of view Doom95 seems like a "half-assed old school" thing somewhere between vanilla and source ports. I never acquired any historical, habit-based or nostalgic appreciation for it.

Wagi said:
All of the sound effects played at a lower pitch, for some reason.

From my experience, it's somewhat similar to how a Sound Blaster handles sound in full DOS mode. In DOS under Windows 9x, sound is higher-pitched (and cleaner).

Never_Again said:
Still useless without autorun.

Not being an autorun user, I'd critique its lack of novert support, instead.

Doom95 is a source port, Shareware Doom is a collection of levels.

I bet you know he meant "the DOS executable" :p

He has a point too because on its shareware package info blurb Doom95 doesn't say "shareware" while the DOS counterpart does, and presentation plays a big role in defining how things get called.

[Karnizero]

myk said:

I bet you know he meant "the DOS executable" :p

He has a point too because on its shareware package info blurb Doom95 doesn't say "shareware" while the DOS counterpart does, and presentation plays a big role in defining how things get called.

I don't remember how the boxes were, since I lost Doom Shareware and Plutonia TNT CDs much time ago. Well, not lost, just have a friend that never return me back and he is living far away from where i am.

I remember playing "Doom Shareware" in DOS. Maybe not Shareware, maybe yes. Don't remember.
And Plutonia with Doom 95 on a Pentium 133 with Win95 which included a kind of catch-the-flag futuristic cars game tittled "Hover".

My Plutonia experience was way better and I still remember it as my best days playing doom with friends, and don't care about the port bugs.

Playing Doom95 is like remembering old good times. No extra features where needed to enjoy Doom. And no bugs could interrupt our demon assassination

It's a shame that not much actual PWADs feels like those ol'days maps.

Oh, and of course, I always played Doom with Keyboard only and had no problem, and know some people that still plays Doom with keyboard only.


Whatever, some of the bugs have usermade patches that can enhance Doom95, such as mouse support and demo recording/playback.

[Grazza]

Never_Again said:

Are those the same people that call an iPod "MP3"? I think I know the type. ;)

Yeah, it's all around us. People call any paper tissue a "Kleenex", searching the Internet (with any search engine) "Googling", and Jarlsberg cheese from Norway is called "Swiss cheese" in the US simply because there are big holes in it. I suppose Appenzeller cheese from Switzerland isn't Swiss cheese because the holes are too small.

I think it's right to be a little irritated by these things, just so you remember that they are actually errors, but also to accept that such things are inevitable.

I don't know, but for whatever reason I quickly returned to Doom2.exe after installing Doom95. I don't recall playing more than a level or so with it. I think the launcher just seemed clumsy and restrictive. Also, I think I was accustomed to using a boot disk when I played Doom (and booting the computer in DOS mode) so as to improve performance by giving the program as much of the computer's resources as possible. Doom95 simply didn't fit in with that (and gave inferior performance), so I kind of ignored it.