What was the first Doom source port you have used?

[cyphh]

Other than running Doom games off of DOS, It would be Doom 95 and then Doomsday to then GZDoom.

[DSC]

ZDoom.

[Plasi Garbo]

I ran doom sharware in dos mode on a windows xp pc and did not know how anything worked

[Straal99]

GZDoom with The Ultimate Doom

[Kaiser_Wilhelm2]

I may have originally played doom95. As a very little boy in preschool a friend of mine had played doom and hyped it up to me, but I’m not sure if I played it personally. The first 3D game I played was descent we would play descent two player one person would shoot the other would fly.. But the first time I really played doom was zdoom. I downloaded it and the doom wads from a file sharing program. I liked zdoom so much I got confused when I played other versions of doom later on because there was no crosshairs so I had to seek out zdoom.

Edited April 8, 2020 by Kaiser_Wilhelm2

[RichardDS90]

Doomsday at around 2004. 3D models really appealed to me back then until I used Risen3D and finally settling on GZDoom after the 3D model novelty wore off on me.

[haruko haruhara]

I first used zdoom back when my brother had shown me doom oh the memories when I only had 13 wads at the time

[MrFlibble]

My first port was Doom Legacy, in around 2004. Back then I was a Dune II fan of sorts, and there was an engine recreation project called Dune Legacy, and its author (or one of the authors) also happened to have written a bot for Doom Legacy. Before that, I would only play the DOS version of Doom in Windows 98. Doom Legacy blew my mind, because of all the advanced features, high resolution, etc. I completed the shareware episode with the "cheaty" mouselook and jumping, and a good part of Doom II too :)

 

Later on I also discovered Doomsday and had used it for a while as the main port of choice. I played a lot of Hexen on that engine.

 

Since then I've become much more conservative about extra features in source ports, and now prefer Choco/Crispy and PrBoom+, but Doom Legacy still makes me feel very nostalgic.

[DwarfCleric]

On regards to newer source port comparisons regarding lighting, some screenshots here. Wish I knew about all this before.

If you want the "classic" look but still want to be able to load gameplay mods, use ZDoomLE.

https://imgur.com/user/hcueiwb47vndhs84

[Grazza]

Boom - specifically "BOOM v2.0b --- Phase 1 Beta Release". From the date stamp of my local copy of the files, I downloaded them on 3rd April 1998.

[smeghammer]

On 4/8/2020 at 8:50 PM, Kaiser_Wilhelm2 said:

The first 3D game I played was descent we would play descent two player one person would shoot the other would fly.

Bloody hell! Descent! I had that - it really fucked with my head - had not learned mouse control then (was playing Doom - badly - with keyboard only). Never occurred to me to have 2 people controlling it.

 

Hmm... may be worth firing it up again...

[drfrag]

@Redneckerz Was that boom beta lost?

 While looking for it i've just found a LsdlDoom fork partially ported to C++ and using SDL2. Well it seems that's what it is.

https://github.com/rlsosborne/doom

[Murdoch]

Is Doom 95 a source port? I suppose it technically is, but in spirit it is not. To me, source ports are versions of the engine released by 3rd parties after the public release of the source code. So my first will be the original - DOSDoom, closely followed by Doom Legacy and then Boom. Boom would have been the one that I first used with any degree of regularity thanks to it's significant range of original engine fixes.

Edited April 10, 2020 by Murdoch

[Redneckerz]

9 hours ago, Grazza said:

Boom - specifically "BOOM v2.0b --- Phase 1 Beta Release". From the date stamp of my local copy of the files, I downloaded them on 3rd April 1998.

So that's two weeks before the initial 2.00 release.

 

4 hours ago, drfrag said:

@Redneckerz Was that boom beta lost?

*Quick checks*

 

I found a post confirming that the first public beta was released on March 31, 1998, by a post from Grazza himself in 2018. Incidentially, it links to the same zip file as Grazza linked above, called boombet0.zip.

So technically, no, that beta was not lost, just never considered as such :P

The first official release of the beta, to beta testers only, was released March 3, 1998, as mentioned in this post.

 

The annoying thing is that i can see the text belonging to the post (Its a Doomworld post) but i can't access or link it because its in a search result, and DW's search does not work atm. :<

Another post reveals that this Beta apparently introduced the functionality for the Extended Help Screens that @fraggle discussed in January, but a bug later got introduced by Lee Killough that the Beta does not have.

@JadingTsunami was the author of those two posts.

EDIT:
I managed to get the links to these posts as visiting a user profile page and then their Topics or Posts still work.
EDIT2:
@Revenant100 linked to a site in this 2018 post. That link contains a files repository of old rare Doom stuff, including boom200.zip.

It also links to a zip file of a debug build of BZDoom, a port whose zips were long lost, but it is broken.

Quote

 While looking for it i've just found a LsdlDoom fork partially ported to C++ and using SDL2. Well it seems that's what it is.

https://github.com/rlsosborne/doom

 

One useful resource is Operation Boom, rather unusually, a Japanese site that kept track of a lot of Boom related news and downloads and has the accurate release date for GLBoom-Beta (2000-04-10)

 

They came in real handy when covering the hilariously named Steve Boom and PrjDoom ports.

Edited April 10, 2020 by Redneckerz

[JadingTsunami]

6 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

Another post reveals that this Beta apparently introduced the functionality for the Extended Help Screens that @fraggle discussed in January, but a bug later got introduced by Lee Killough that the Beta does not have.

 

Yes, I remember I did find the bug in the source code. It looked like some refactoring Lee had done broke the data structure pointers.

 

[Mara]

The one that was in Xbox Live Arcade on 360. I do not remember how perfectly accurate was it, but it was quite an experience. I do remember that it had online play as well and coop was fun.

[Redneckerz]

1 hour ago, JadingTsunami said:

 

Yes, I remember I did find the bug in the source code. It looked like some refactoring Lee had done broke the data structure pointers.

 

But the bug is not present in Boom 2.01/2.02, PrBoom or PrBoom+ or such?

[JadingTsunami]

56 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

But the bug is not present in Boom 2.01/2.02, PrBoom or PrBoom+ or such?

 

The bug is still there to this day. It has never been fixed (as far as I know).

 

The fix is not complicated. I thought of submitting a PR but realized there's nowhere to submit such a thing. :)

Edited April 10, 2020 by JadingTsunami
Clarification

[Redneckerz]

17 minutes ago, JadingTsunami said:

 

The bug is still there to this day. It has never been fixed (as far as I know).

 

The fix is not complicated. I thought of submitting a PR but realized there's nowhere to submit such a thing. :)

How come Fraggle was able to do his wad then?

I personally think Extended Helper Screens have potential.

[JadingTsunami]

2 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

How come Fraggle was able to do his wad then?

I personally think Extended Helper Screens have potential.

 

I fear I may be thread-jacking so perhaps we should start a new thread after this, but to answer your question the bug affects Doom 2 only.

 

From that thread:

 

Quote

Extended Help Screens allow WAD authors to embed extra fullscreen help screens into WADs, which are displayed after the usual HELP2 and CREDIT screens when you choose "Read This!" from the main menu. Unfortunately they only work with doom.wad and not with doom2.wad, since doom2.wad doesn't have "Read This!" on the main menu - I think this is an oversight by the Boom developers. You can browse forward and backward through the help screens by pressing enter and backspace.

 

Emphasis mine. But, this wasn't an oversight - it's a proper bug. The intended functionality was that the F1 help menu would be extended by the user-defined help screens, which would work in Doom and Doom 2.

[-Knightly-]

gzdoom 

[Katey Kat]

GZDOOM. still use it.

[Plasma Slayer]

Doom95!

[Redneckerz]

13 hours ago, JadingTsunami said:

 

I fear I may be thread-jacking so perhaps we should start a new thread after this, but to answer your question the bug affects Doom 2 only.

 

From that thread:

 

 

Emphasis mine. But, this wasn't an oversight - it's a proper bug. The intended functionality was that the F1 help menu would be extended by the user-defined help screens, which would work in Doom and Doom 2.

Good idea. ill quote these posts in Fraggle's thread about helper screens and lets move from there.

[ketmar]

Doom Legacy.

[MFG38]

I believe my first source port was either Doom Legacy or Doomsday - both of which I only used for a brief time before ultimately settling on ZDoom, and neither of which I've touched in at least 10 years.

[Jello]

I guess Doom95, although it was the MAC version that my grandfather got for some weird reason. He might've won it in a sweepstakes, he was always putting in entries for sweepstakes. But he thought us grandkids might like it. And he had only used MAC computers, so yeah. I really don't think he looked at it. I really can't imagine him seeing even the cover of the box and thinking "Yeah, guy with a shotgun shooting a demon. That'll be good for the grandkids." Or maybe he did, he got through the Korean War, he chased bulls around at rodeos taking pictures, I don't think there's a thing on Earth that would've surprised him. Miss the guy. I think it was in 96, maybe 97 (not quite sure when the MAC version was released) I saw it upstairs sitting by his computer, so I asked if it was ok to install it.  It was just kind of a weird experience, playing Doom 2 upstairs at my grandparents house. 

 

After that, it would've been jDoom. I had gotten out of Doom for quite awhile after Quake came out, then Half-Life, but then I found the first Doom book, Knee Deep in the Dead in the school library, after reading it I figured I might as well look at it again. By that point, we had internet, and then I found Doomworld. And found out there were ports that added things. jDoom was neat, if troubled. Especially with the 3D models, they just really didn't work well in the game. The enemies should be able to change sprite states quickly, and fire. Doing that with a 3D model is hard to make it not look like crap.

 

Once ZDoom came out, I used that. Now I use GZDoom for the most part. Although it looks like Zandronum is going to be the next step, and it works well. I just have my ZDoom configuration exactly how I like it, as far as mouse movement and speed are set up. I'll just have to take some time and recreate it in Zandronum.

 

Switching to a widescreen monitor a few years ago fucked up my Doom game. Going from a 4:3 to a 16:9 completely changes the speed that you need to set your X and Y axis by. Mainly the Y. And I just haven't been bothered to set up Zandronum to match GZDoom, mainly because it still works.

Edited April 12, 2020 by Jello

[Shrekmeister]

my first real source port experience and the first time playing doom ( shareware ) is crispy doom

[Doomlover77]

My first doom source port was Boom 2.02 followed by Zdoom & Doom Legacy in 2003. Excellent Ports. Now I use Gzdoom.  @Doomlover77  

[ducon]

Maybe lxdoom more than 20 years ago.