Where can I get a full version of Doom 1 made in 1993?

[fraggle]

On 2/2/2020 at 3:49 PM, Diabolución said:

As far I am aware, there are at least two users of this forum who own the CD release of Registered Doom 1.9. One of them is @omega_supreme . I cannot mention the other for privacy reasons.

I recently picked up a copy but the seller believed it to be a bootleg - it matches the copy GreyGhost shared pictures of in this thread. It's in a jewel case (no big box) and has a mini printed copy of the manual that slots into the front of it.

 

On 2/2/2020 at 4:15 PM, MIND said:

Did CD players not exist on computers in 1993 or something? Why was it only released on floppy? :/ Strange.

Nobody seems to have taken the time to explain things for you so I'll do that now.

 

CD-ROM drives existed back in 1993 but at the time they were still quite uncommon. It felt like a pretty big deal to be able to say you had a computer with a CD-ROM drive - I know this because my brother and I got our first PC for Christmas 1993 and it was a Multimedia PC with a CD-ROM and a sound card too.

 

Almost everything was released on 3.5" floppy disk until probably around 1996 when CD-ROM drives were common enough that everyone switched to that. As a point of comparison, you could get Windows 95 on floppy disk (it required 15 disks). Note that even in 1993, some people apparently still had 5.25" floppy drives, and the original Doom order form had an option for that but not for a CD version.

 

Everything on floppy disks was highly compressed and squeezing every byte out of the disks possible. It would take several minutes to extract the contents onto your hard drive and there's no way you would be "running from floppy" - something that was done with earlier PC games in the 80s when even hard drives were uncommon. Floppy disks by this time were a vessel to get the game to your hard drive. id shopped around for the best compression format they could find to squeeze Doom onto four floppy disks and I suspect even stuff like the extra zombie rotations were cut to save space. It's no surprise that CD-ROM drives became popular very quickly because the capacity they offered over a floppy drive was nothing short of mind-blowing.

[Diabolución]

10 hours ago, fraggle said:

it matches the copy GreyGhost shared pictures of in this thread.

 

The mastering ring code is indeed suspicious. Also, according to this post is definitely a bootleg.

[VGA]

Is this legit, like someone said later?

 

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2071760

[OleBumma]

Ultimate Doom CD is your way to go, or the ID Anthology box if you realky havemony to blow, lol

[Graf Zahl]

20 hours ago, fraggle said:

Everything on floppy disks was highly compressed and squeezing every byte out of the disks possible. It would take several minutes to extract the contents onto your hard drive and there's no way you would be "running from floppy" - something that was done with earlier PC games in the 80s when even hard drives were uncommon. Floppy disks by this time were a vessel to get the game to your hard drive.

 

Unless you had to deal with people who missed the signs of the times.

 

That reminds me of a game I worked on in 1992. The requirements were:

 

1) Must fit on a 360 kb 5 1/4' floppy.

2. Must be launchable from the floppy.

3. Must work in DOS without extenders (512 kb RAM use at most)

 

The requirements were set by marketing goons at a time when it really was too late to change course so that required some hacks to achieve.

For once, all data needed to be compressed to fit, but common decompressor code was not available back then (no internet, no access) All we had was the LZEXE executable compressor. So what we did was add all game data with the exception of 4 large images to the executable itself as binary blobs and then compressed the whole thing with LZEXE and the 4 large images with a very simple RLE compressor as that was all we could afford to add to the EXE.

It got worse: Since all data was in the EXE that also meant the redundant assets for VGA and EGA, so the next step was to use those asset memory blocks as game storage later. Due to all that memory shrinkage which even involved optimizing the source to create shorter object code the end result was one horrible mess of C and assembly code, it was never to be compiled on any other platform again.

Yes, it ran from the floppy, but what a waste of time for a medium that at this point was long obsolete and everybody knew except the idiots in marketing.

Had we been able to ship on an 1.2 MB floppy, or even a 720 kb 3 1/2 disk it'd have saved us a lot of work...

 

Those were fun times compared to how large games are today... :)

 

[Diabolución]

On 2/5/2020 at 7:47 AM, VGA said:

[...]

 

Quote

Edited February 7, 2020 by Diabolución