Doom historical demo site listing

[4shockblast]

I've long enjoyed looking through ancient/historical Doom demo site websites and links, and recently, I decided to try to actually keep some record of the different sites that have existed and their URLs/archives. This effort resulted in this document, organized by type of website: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aqCO5pM8CuEfratRBs6iNRk5rNlXy9NfdFlgXsEjcag/edit?usp=sharing.

 

The main purposes of this were the following: general historical interest (maybe for adding to the Doom Wiki in the future or other historical resources) and figuring out the extent of demoing that appears to have been lost to time. For the latter specifically, I have ended up with the following questions:

 

1. Are all DHT exams available on idgames? Same question applies to the R_U_GOOD demos.
2. Is there a chance anyone could have demos from any of the following (there are some other ones marked as missing or possibly missing on the doc, but these appear to be the main ones):
   • Mineral's SDA contests
     • I haven't seeked out anyone from the actual SDA to confirm if these were purged from the archives or still around somewhere, but I cannot find them on the current Quake SDA.
   • last two Team Insanity competitions
     • I could only find some of these on archive.org.
   • some Wim Vanrie competitions
   • Doomaniax-N
     • possibly some overlap with Compet-N/P-DANG/Czech-N?
   • Mirra Speedrunning
     • possibly some overlap with Compet-N/P-DANG/Czech-N as well?
   • XFury
     • possibly some overlap with DSDA?
   • Doom Zone CZ contests
3. I could not find any record of even archived web pages for competitions from RicRobNet or Doomster. It is especially surprising for the former, given the Doomworld hosted site is still up today, and there are numerous URLs archived for it, but no competitions (plus it was the subject of a notable cheating instance). I've determined that at least chord and kmetl_10 were competitions for RicRobNet from other resources, and some demos from Doomster competitions are archived on DSDA. I'd be surprised if anyone would have any archive of these demos (although that would be super cool), but would anyone at least know what wads were competed on for these comps?

 

Also, if you have any other sites that I have missed, please post them below along with any other info you may know, whether or not they are up or archived. Same applies to any historical URLs I might have missed for the sites listed in the doc.

 

If nothing else, even if none of the above questions are answered, I've come up with enough demos from websites that happen to still be up (old Czech-N URLs are OP!!) and some that are available through archive.org that this was quite a useful endeavor. :) And also, at the very least, maybe some others here would enjoy browsing through the annals of Doom demo history in a more organized manner.

Edited May 17, 2021 by 4shockblast

[Dimon12321]

Another one is tasvideos.org. Stores a couple of Doom demos, but it should be the last place for you to store Doom material. There's only 1 demo that's not uploaded to DSDA (at least, from what I know): http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/23222244137625620

Edited May 17, 2021 by Dimon12321

[Grazza]

For demos that used to be in the idgames archive before they purged a bunch of demos, this should be useful.

 

It's from an old Korean mirror of cdrom.com (Sogang University - one of the earliest Doom archives) that must have stopped being synched with the idgames archive before at least one purge, as it has a lot of files that weren't there in more up-to-date mirrors.

 

[Grazza]

Here's the Mineral stuff (from Opulent's files). The Mines (Kurkela) demos are already in the DSDA archive.

mineral.zip

 

Edited May 19, 2021 by Grazza

[vdgg]

I am probably posting this 10 years too late :)

I understand it was Czech-N related, IDoom, run by Twister. They were organizing speedrun contests. Some of the winning demos are faster than DSDA records and they are probably gone... Plus, they had weird naming convention and text files. I would LOVE to have the winners, if not at DSDA, at least available for me to watch

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20190319211233/http://contest.idoom.cz/news01.php

 

Here's the summary

 

season 1

            WAD                               Winner         Time

contest 1 - dwango5 nm speed collector (?)    Graim          24.60
contest 2 - leper map03                       hokis          32.00
contest 3 - vilchal                           Twister        35.57   !!
contest 4 - ser1                              Graim          44.40
contest 5 - paganrun                          Twister      2:00.94   !!
contest 6 - gogo                              Twister        32.94
contest 7 - ancient map02                     Twister        41.80
contest 8 - judgemnt                          hokis          46.63

season 2

contest 9 - m1style                           Twister        27.49
contest10 - arbor2  nomo collector            Twister      1:03.26
contest11 - an_coop                           dew            40.77   OK
contest12 - vv2 map06                         dew            14.51   OK
contest13 - doom2 map15 normal exit           Twister      1:21.03   OK (not record)
contest14 - nb_wst01                          Twister        22.11
contest15 - mlm12 map01-map03 combo           Twister      1:25
contest16 - reekrank                          Kimo Xvirus    40.97   OK

season3

contest17 - brit10 map07 collector            Kimo Xvirus    12.23
contest18 - rebirth map02                     Kimo Xvirus    19.91   !!
contest19 - self-ep                           Twister      1:05.46
contest20 - jusshoot max                      hokis          27.34   !!
contest21 - Warcade4                          hokis          33.34   !!
contest22 - visor-1                           Kimo Xvirus  1:19.80
contest23 - doom2 map29                       hokis        1:42.97   OK (not record)
contest24 - idmqwcon map04 collector          psichotik    1:00.17

!! - means the winner had a better time than current DSDA record (in case of vilchal, there were 5 demos faster...)

OK - means the demo actually is uploaded and present at DSDA

Category is UV Speed unless noted otherwise

Edited May 23, 2021 by vdgg

[4shockblast]

I've been meaning to respond here, but have been busy, but thanks for the info on the contests. I would like to see all the contests from the various comps in the past on DSDA, although it is a bit tricky to add them. Some are already up, but they end up in Other or some category with a note, meaning it's really hard to compare the different times on them. If all of them get categories, we get something like Collector where a category that is not very popular and probably doesn't need to exist clutters the table a bit (plus with Collector, there's the additional annoyance that the rules ended up changed post-contest...). I think adding them to Other/category with note would make sense, but I guess ideally, they would have their own small leaderboards that are accessible, kind of like the demo pack view feature on DSDA 2. Or they could have categories but be more hidden somehow, idk.

[4shockblast]

On 5/17/2021 at 11:55 AM, Grazza said:

For demos that used to be in the idgames archive before they purged a bunch of demos, this should be useful.

 

It's from an old Korean mirror of cdrom.com (Sogang University - one of the earliest Doom archives) that must have stopped being synched with the idgames archive before at least one purge, as it has a lot of files that weren't there in more up-to-date mirrors.

 

 

Long time no update to this thread, but some cool stuff I discovered recently regarding the lost pre-v1.9 demos off the idgames archive. I was researching the claim I found on the wiki and on the current archive that Dasa's lv27 demo was the first demo on the archive (listed as Nov 18), and I started looking into the history.log which was preserved in the above archive snapshot. I decided to input a filename I didn't recognize from the history.log in there to the https://discmaster.textfiles.com/ website and discovered one CD that somehow managed to grab at least a partial snapshot of the early Compet-N demos: https://archive.org/details/hell-on-cd-rom-ocurrence-2. :) It has what may be the majority (hard to say, but seems so) of the v1.7 demos (and at least one v1.666 demo) that were purged from Compet-N, and original versions of the demos converted to v1.9 (like the aforementioned Dasa demo). This means that, at least in large part, we have a reasonable archive of those days.

 

Some caveats: the archive is still clearly incomplete. Looking at the history.log and early Compet-N newspots on Usenet, I found at least the following demos missing from it:

From newsposts:
E1M1-344 ZIP DooM - Episode 1 Mission 1 in 03 Minutes and 44 Seconds
LV01-419 ZIP Doom2 - Level 01 [ on UV ] in 04 Minutes and 19 Seconds
LV01--12 ZIP Doom2 - Level 01 [ on UV ] in 00 Minutes and 12 Seconds
LV08-929 ZIP LV 08 in 09:29 C. Stratford
L09-1522 ZIP LV 09 in 15:22 C. Stratford
EP1-4932 ZIP ALL E1 - 49:32 So beat this - my third attempt
LV01-008 ZIP LV 01 in 00:08 (probably)

From the history.log
L31-1257 ZIP    09/03/95   22:23 !!  S. Widlake   (s.widlake@rl.ac.uk)
LV03-231 ZIP    06/09/95   08:34     O. Heering (Oli@slop.prima.ruhr.de)
LV03-437 ZIP    27/11/94   13:42

Some notes on the above list:

• The probably demo: given this was from the January 25, 1995 newspost (the earliest one we have, no other ones appear until April), it could not have been a v1.9 demo. This suggests that this isn't the same as Widlake's 0:08 on the archive, as all pre-v1.9 lv01 demos desynced due to most the things being shifted a bit on the map (similar issue that caused the stuck shotgunner and barrel on map 02). It isn't listed who recorded this one, so unfortunately, we may never know.
• I'm also not sure who C. Stratford was (note these are also UV-Speed times, heh), and we have no other demos from O. Heering either (on the archive, he is cryptically listed as having a single demo, but no downloads, so maybe the lv03 is this run? https://compet-n.gamers.org/index.php?page=compet-n_database&cndb=&wad_id=&category=&player_id=60), so those demos would be interesting to come by. The history.log suggests he didn't get the secret on 03, so it would have been invalid (and 03 demos would also desync with the latest IWAD because of the extra backpack room).
• The first three demos would have been the original example demos; the current ones were recorded with the v1.9 IWAD.
• The CD linked above includes at least one demo not mentioned in either the history.log or any newsposts I could find (lv03-505 by Simon Widlake). Not sure if this was part of Compet-N and just missed, or if it was simply somewhere on Simon's FTP server. In any case, this suggests that there may be demos that we don't know about, I doubt there would be too many, though.
• I also didn't check the history.log thoroughly; the original filename I checked was lv30-uv!. This one is not listed among ver17 demos, but it also was not a ver19 demo originally. Not clear why this demo is missing from the archive since it does play back with v1.9; perhaps it was retracted afterwards.

One other fun part about this CD is it happens to include a partial snapshot of what were probably the earliest H2H contest submissions as well, which confirms for sure that there were other demos recorded for the WADs that aren't part of the final zips. I suspect there would have been a lot more, but oh well, this is already pretty cool.

 

In the end, this didn't help me figure out who recorded the first demo; the partially missing archive, inherent untrustworthiness of file timestamps (though I'm inclined to trust the ones from Dasa), the fact that demos could have been submit to the archive after their initial recording time, etc., all mean we probably have no clue who did record the first demos, though I guess this finding is probably more interesting than the little factoid of who was first.

 

Perhaps one day we will find a CD or hard drive that has an archive early enough that that can provide the earliest missing demos and provide more insight who was the first to record demos, or an archive with more H2H submissions, but for now, this seems to be the only CD that has anything like this from what I could tell. Most other lmps that typically ended up on CDs were basically all the same demos (LMP hall of fame, Typhoon demos, etc.), so I guess we're pretty lucky we got this one, heh.

 

Also, I updated the Compet-N section on the sheet (finally marked it inactive, heh), and I added the latest URL, along with a few others (known FTP URLs, redirects, and the temporary GitHub mirror). I updated the Compet-N page on the Doom Wiki with the above information, as best as I could summarize it.

 

At one point I also found some new sites but got lazy to add them, now I don't remember what they are. :^) Maybe I should do some more random website digging sometime, heh.

Edited April 14, 2024 by 4shockblast

[Xymph]

Great research. Let me know if I can help digging into Compet-n files locally - I got the whole tree from fx but don't know my way around it much. :)

Didn't find a file with 'heering' in it, although rgrep of course doesn't match plain text in .zip's.

 

Also FYI, the official rgcd.announce post archive is at https://www.gamers.org/pub/archives/doom/articles/ , which may be easier to search/traverse than google groups.

 

Edited April 14, 2024 by Xymph