Hardware broken playing Doom?

[bcwood16]

Just remembered something that happened back in the 90's while playing Doom.

I was playing Doom...lots, as I expect we almost all did back then, I was on a 486 etc, but obviously back then had no flat screens and was using a CRT screen. Anyway, I fired the BFG...the most awesome gun of any FPS back then ( my opinion anyway) and there was a bright white flash, as you would expect, except it followed with a loud pop and a even brighter flash and then....nothing....blank. I had killed all the bad guys, but the BFG had also blown my screen, had to buy a new one.....well my dad did anyway lol

Anybody else break any hardware playing Doom, or maybe even crashed their computer trying to get it to run...modified config.sys etc ?

[Maes]

I once blew a cap in my 14" SVGA monitor while playing Doom, and the screen got a greenish tint. This was eventually repaired though, and that same screen was still used everyday and functioned flawlessly until 2008 or so, when I donated it to the Army.

[schwerpunk]

That sounds like the most epic BFG shot ever...

The only similar story I have is the power going out while I was playing Mechwarrior online - just as my mech was powering down. Nothing relating to Doom.

[Grazza]

I suppose broken keys on the keyboard are too trivial to be worth mentioning? That's that's all I've had (on STRAIN map03).

[Da Werecat]

My keyboard still works after more than 10 years of killing stuff. It needs cleaning though.

[CorSair]

Nothing spectacular, except keyboard taken bit hit, like the letters W,A,S and D are fading. Backspace button is currently broken, dunno how I did that (still works, but rather painful to press it,) and some cracks on few buttons.
Move along.

[Revved]

I had my previous keyboard's down key wear out from using it too much while playing Doom.

My hard drive also crashed back in 2009 while playing Kama Sutra Map 19, although that was less Doom itself more than it is my HD nearing its limit.

[Maes]

Speaking of keyboards...I still have my original Dooming keyboard (and computer) around. Maybe I should give them a go?

[Touchdown]

DOOM never broke anything for me.

Quake (1, software) on the other hand fried a piece of hardware. Twice.

[TwinBeast]

My laptop CPU heats up to 100°C in a few minutes when I play anything.. and recently I've played Doom. Then it also started to crash when I'm not even playing anything. I think it got damaged.

Switched back to my old computer, which stays cool even after hours of playing, doesn't even go above 50°C. Also it's much cooler to play Doom on a 22" screen than on a 17"! And 16:10 rocks!

[GreyGhost]

Black screens and/or total lockups used to be a regular occurrence when using PrBoom+, our old friend SDL_mixer turned out to be the culprit.

CorSair said:

Nothing spectacular, except keyboard taken bit hit, like the letters W,A,S and D are fading.

Cheap keyboard. Many of my keys are getting a bit shiny from 13 years of regular use, but there's no fading.

Jimi said:

My laptop CPU heats up to 100°C in a few minutes when I play anything.. and recently I've played Doom. Then it also started to crash when I'm not even playing anything.

Sounds like a ventilation issue, try cleaning the fan's filter.

[RestlessRodent]

bcwood16 said:

Just remembered something that happened back in the 90's while playing Doom.

I was playing Doom...lots, as I expect we almost all did back then, I was on a 486 etc, but obviously back then had no flat screens and was using a CRT screen. Anyway, I fired the BFG...the most awesome gun of any FPS back then ( my opinion anyway) and there was a bright white flash, as you would expect, except it followed with a loud pop and a even brighter flash and then....nothing....blank. I had killed all the bad guys, but the BFG had also blown my screen, had to buy a new one.....well my dad did anyway lol

Anybody else break any hardware playing Doom, or maybe even crashed their computer trying to get it to run...modified config.sys etc ?

The color information signal probably caused the monitor to self destruct, since back then the video card would create the signal, the video card caused your CRT to die. Monitors back in those days did not care what was sent to it, they did not filtering or sanity checks, so if the card sent something wrong it could die.

[Quasar]

Broken, never, but one time when I got a venetian blinds crash, this came out of my printer:

[Da Werecat]

5
5
7

??+?

He comes.

[Holering]

Never. Only problem I had was repeating drums with the gravis ultrasound driver in dos; card wasn't broken though (was a glitch with the pat format). Never replaced my 21" crt and never will (hate scrolling through so much text on widescreens, input lags, and the awful scaling issues with LCD's. At least their refresh rates are getting better with light boost: http://www.blurbusters.com/zero-motion-blur/lightboost/).

[schwerpunk]

Quasar said:

Broken, never, but one time when I got a venetian blinds crash, this came out of my printer:
http://imgur.com/xtsjmyv

Something similar happened to me. Probably nerdy poltergeists.

I also remembered a crash that occurred at a friend's place. You know those lockups where the last bit of sound just keeps looping? One of those. Anyway, we were playing System Shock 2 and the computer locked up and looped with SHODAN saying "dead, dead, dead, dead" over and over again. It was magical.

[Doomkid]

Playing Doom has broken my hopes and dreams of living a life outside of Doom.

Jokes aside, I can't think of a single time hardware has been affected by playing. Plenty of repeating-sound crashes, and when I was really young I couldn't fingure out how to set up the sound effects for the life of me. I just ended up playing with General MIDI and the damn PC speaker for about a year at least, and this was after hearing it with the proper sound effects, so that was kind of annoying. I was young though.