Zoomed Out Border

[princetontiger]

Does anyone know why Doom applies a greenish border when you zoom out?

 

What's the original point of this? I was thinking back to WIndows 95 and DOS days, but nothing came to mind.

[scifista42]

Well, the purpose of the "zoom out" is to decrease size (and resolution) of the screen in which the game is rendered, usually to improve performance. As the physical monitor's resolution remains the same, there is now space around the shrunk game screen that needs to be covered by something. And the reason why they covered it with a texture instead of pitch blackness was probably just aesthetical.

[princetontiger]

Interesting. Thanks

[Pegleg]

As I recall, if you go all the down to the smallest size, they also include a small message that reads something like, "Get a 486. :-)"

[ASD]

That's ROTT.

[Pegleg]

You're right. It's been 20 years since the only time I tried it just to see what would happen, so I just switched the two in my mind as to which game I was playing.

 

Overall, though, I agree with @scifista42 that the motivation for the border is just aesthetic.

[Memfis]

What was more efficient, zooming out or setting "graphic detail: low"?

[fraggle]

Gosh I feel old. Doom has been around for so long now, it's such an old game, that it's hard to imagine that some computers weren't fast enough to run it. But back in 1994, over half of PCs could barely even run the game (and those are survey results from a newsgroup of Doom fans). The game was such a big deal that people back then would run it on their 386es, in low detail, at a postage stamp screen size, at <10fps, just to play it.

 

It's easy to forget (or to never have experienced), but a lot of machines back then didn't even have sound cards. I had a 486/33 laptop and the choice was either silence or the bleep, bloop of the PC speaker effects. A machine of that class took around two minutes just to start the game - you had to sit staring at a text screen with a progress bar [..........     ] slowly filling up while it processed all the textures. Back then, PCs really were "Personal" Computers - my first PC didn't have a modem or an Ethernet port in it. Sounds weird to say now, but there was something strangely magical about connecting two computers together and playing a multiplayer game together.

 

Anyway I'm rambling. TL;DR: get off my lawn you kids.

[Rachael]

12 hours ago, Memfis said:

What was more efficient, zooming out or setting "graphic detail: low"?

Zooming out is more efficient because it's less pixels, overall. Setting low graphic detail simply doubled the pixel width which itself did offer a significant boost because it only had to do half the column walks which was the biggest performance killer, but it still had the overhead with ultimately having to deal with all those pixels that shrinking the screen did not have; and memory access between the CPU and the VGA was not cheap for performance in those days.

[Resigned_34]

Someone else has brought this up before, put newer games sometimes ask you to adjust the borders of the screen. I would think that they would automatically match the size of the screen if it's a common aspect ratio like 4:3 and 16:9.

Edited October 29, 2017 by Jamins34

[Koko Ricky]

It's important to note that Doom didn't require the fastest PC in the world to run, but you did need an above-average machine at the time. A slow 486 or a pretty decent 386 could run the game, but not well. The smaller screen size is the compromise, since there are fewer pixels to draw each frame. I remember running it at a pretty small size with the low res option on, and boy did it look like shit.

[Pegleg]

On 10/25/2017 at 0:24 AM, fraggle said:

Gosh I feel old. Doom has been around for so long now, it's such an old game, that it's hard to imagine that some computers weren't fast enough to run it. But back in 1994, over half of PCs could barely even run the game (and those are survey results from a newsgroup of Doom fans). The game was such a big deal that people back then would run it on their 386es, in low detail, at a postage stamp screen size, at <10fps, just to play it.

 

It's easy to forget (or to never have experienced), but a lot of machines back then didn't even have sound cards. I had a 486/33 laptop and the choice was either silence or the bleep, bloop of the PC speaker effects. A machine of that class took around two minutes just to start the game - you had to sit staring at a text screen with a progress bar [..........     ] slowly filling up while it processed all the textures. Back then, PCs really were "Personal" Computers - my first PC didn't have a modem or an Ethernet port in it. Sounds weird to say now, but there was something strangely magical about connecting two computers together and playing a multiplayer game together.

 

Anyway I'm rambling. TL;DR: get off my lawn you kids.

I also had a 486/33 that we upgraded to a 486/66 (does anybody else remember the "chip" that you clipped on the top to double your chip speed, which was really just a fan that increased the cooling for your now-overclocked processor?). Back in 1997, I remember joking with a friend about the progression of clock speeds, saying that whenever we reached the Pentium 666, its niche would be servers using it for Doom.

 

Oh well, I guess you kids should stay off my lawn, too.

[Pegleg]

21 hours ago, GoatLord said:

It's important to note that Doom didn't require the fastest PC in the world to run, but you did need an above-average machine at the time. A slow 486 or a pretty decent 386 could run the game, but not well. The smaller screen size is the compromise, since there are fewer pixels to draw each frame. I remember running it at a pretty small size with the low res option on, and boy did it look like shit.

Of course, now we have mods that are low-res on purpose.

 

 

[Koko Ricky]

Low Res Doom seems to be a good solution to making 1:1 voxels, this seems more manageable, on top of looking really interesting.

[Spectre.Charles]

On 10/24/2017 at 1:32 PM, Memfis said:

What was more efficient, zooming out or setting "graphic detail: low"?

Both at the same time.