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Lila Feuer

So my nerdiness got me into Doom95 again.

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After discovering there was a somewhat recent mouse fix for Doom95 I went to grab a copy of it at idgames and tried it out and what do you know, it works.

This is as close as one can get to a true Doom experience without DOSBox or even Choco on modern OS. I actually like how the sound and music is played back on this port, they just seem beefier to me. And little things like the sprites being stretched and slightly shorter serve as a strong nostalgic reminder to my past playings before I knew of source ports which I thought "corrected the sprite offset problem" when they were actually always suppose to NOT look like that on plain Doom.exe! (Realize, Doom95 was my first experience and thought it was nothing more than just being compatible with Windows since I knew it was primarily a DOS game.)

It's not a perfect port, Choco has a better Doom.exe environment and can actually use DeHacked patches, PrBoom+ is essentially Doom with tons of limits removed and more compatibility options to make it as close to the original as possible. But Doom95 still has a special place in my heart even after all this time, it just feels like something that can't be emulated in either other port. Which is why I wish the playback for sounds/sprite stretching could be optional features on those other ports for "Doom95 emulation".

What's your opinion on Doom95 and did you grow up with this port/launcher packaged with your copies of Doom?

EDIT: I also like Doom95 for being able to select a level/difficulty before launching if I want a quick shot of Doom instead of going in-game and idcleving manually.

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I like the down-shifted sound effects, but hate everything else about Doom95. The launcher is really irritating, too. I can already use -warp and -skill from a command line to pick a map and difficulty setting.

The fact that the demo recording functionality is totally broken never really impressed me, either.

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Cyanosis said:

What's your opinion on Doom95 and did you grow up with this port/launcher packaged with your copies of Doom?

Never ever used it.

The Doom engine I grew up with would have been doom.exe v1.666. Same for Doom II; it wasn't until about 2008 that I discovered the silver bars had been removed in MAP02.

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It's an alright port, even though I haven't been able to record demos with it. It came packaged with the Doom Collector's Edition. Works nice on older computers, especially ones without internet, whereas anything with internet is redundant as you then you can just search up some better port. Oh yah, and Doom95 is what I originally played the shareware on.

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Gez said:

it wasn't until about 2008 that I discovered the silver bars had been removed in MAP02.

For me, it wasn't until about 2 weeks ago...

But I've always liked Doom95. It was in it that I played Final Doom for the first time. I was amazed at the "high" resolutions and the laucher was really neat. I still play it from time to time. There's something about it that I can't find in any other port (terrible bugs? :P)

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My original Doom experience (post-shareware) was Doom95 with an Ultimate Doom installation. I never really felt any loyalty to the port, though -- when I played Doom 2 a couple of years later (using the v1.7 doom2.exe), I never thought I was missing much. *shrugs*

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Heh, Doom95 was my first Doom experience.

Does anyone remember that glitch where you'd open a door but instead of opening it'd either turn into a giant HOM or give you the medusa effect?

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Doom95 was my first multiplayer doom experience, when my little brother and I realized we could hook up a serial connection between the computers in our house. This must have been quite a while ago, otherwise we would have just done it over a network. It might have been during the days when my parents were too cheap to pay for internet and we had a free Netzero 56k connection :D

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Clonehunter said:

It's an alright port, even though I haven't been able to record demos with it.

Mithran Denizen said:

The fact that the demo recording functionality is totally broken never really impressed me, either.

I assume you've been trying to record demos via the launcher. This isn't a suitable solution with Doom95, even with the unofficial demo recording bug fix (even that won't remove the 128kb demo limitation). What you need to do is start recording via the command line using regular vanilla parameters, with the addition of "-nodm", which makes the game skip the launcher and records the game as instructed.

Overall I feel the port is redundant outside personal nostalgia value. Just the distorted graphics and sound along with the missing DeHackEd support can be very annoying. It does certainly seem that pretty much the only people appreciating the port at this point are those who originally skipped vanilla and had their first taste of Doom with Doom95.

Though I guess the launcher can be useful if you have not yet memorized the command line arguments or just prefer setting up stuff via menus. Using the command line is a faster method though, and that's what matters to me the most.

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Janizdreg said:

What you need to do is start recording via the command line using regular vanilla parameters, with the addition of "-nodm", which makes the game skip the launcher and records the game as instructed.

Though you will always Ultimate Doom behaviour, so you're quite likely to get incompatible demos if you are using it to record with Doom2, Doom2 pwads or Final Doom.

Regarding using Doom95, I'll quote from my post here:

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.

And there's the fact that dehacked patches can't be used with it.

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My early adolescent playthroughs of Doom and Doom II were from DOS. Doom 95 came a bit later. I liked it okay, and it's how I did most of my Doom II playing prior to discovering source ports, but the only thing I recall with fondness is the music, which probably had more to do with my hardware configuration at the time than the program itself. Actually, the only feature of the soundtrack I can recall was a fuckton of reverb.

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Doom 95 fucking sucks, it has MIDI music instead of the far superior and original OPL.

If you prefer MIDI music then something is really wrong with you, like your parents threw you out of a third story window as a child.

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Sigvatr said:

Doom 95 fucking sucks, it has MIDI music instead of the far superior and original OPL.

If you prefer MIDI music then something is really wrong with you, like your parents threw you out of a third story window as a child.


Defenestration is a long-running trend in my family, but I wouldn't say that I prefer the midis, just a fondness tempered by the shadow of time (10+ years).

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Sigvatr said:

far superior and original OPL.


No way. MIDI owns OPL. Some OPL synth noises are cooler than their MIDI couterparts, but since the drums lack any punchiness whatsoever, overall I think it falls short.

Although, some songs are kinda cool in OPL, such as E2M7

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Sigvatr said:

instead of the far superior and original OPL.


The Roland recordings are superior. OPL makes some stuff sound kinda neat though. Too bad about MIDI however, it used to sound quite nice with my old comp's sound blaster. This one's got "SoundMAX" (more like SoundMIN) which makes all MIDI sound less spectacular.

Though drums sound like drums now instead of "pft".

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I remember I finally got Doom 95 to work without being a splotch of colored vomit on the top left corner of my screen before the mouse fix. Then after the mouse fix I could never get Doom 95 to work again :(

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Cyanosis said:
What's your opinion on Doom95 and did you grow up with this port/launcher packaged with your copies of Doom?

I'm rather neutral about it. I don't bash it and if anyone likes to use it, may they enjoy it. I still use and have historically used vanilla, so I didn't ever make it part of my habits. I've kept a Windows 98 computer so I've always been able to use choose to use Doom or Doom95, lacking neither DOS nor VXD support.

Early on it didn't win me over because the main thing it offered over vanilla was the higher resolution which back then would slow my computer down, that was a 166 MHz Pentium. There were also many user made things I liked to mess with back then that didn't work with Doom95, like a "mouse spinner" allowing 180° turns with a key and some DOS launchers, or DeHackEd itself. Maybe the sound of OPL, that I had gotten used to, also kept me away from it, even though I don't think the music necessarily sounds bad in Doom95. Perhaps the way Doom95 stretches the weapon graphics to accommodate them to 640x480 and 320x240 didn't help either, although I'm sure that would have been less of a problem had I started with Doom95 in the first place.

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