Doom Turns 25: The FPS That Wowed Players, Gummed Up Servers, and Enraged Admins (theregister.co.uk) 214
On December 10, 1993, after a marathon 30-hour coding session, the developers at id Software uploaded the first finished copy of Doom for download, the game that was to redefine first-person shooter (FPS) genre. Hours later IT admins wanted id's guts for garters. The Register: Doom wasn't the first FPS game, but it was the iPhone of the field -- it took parts from various other products and packaged them together in a fearsomely addictive package. Admins loathed it because it hogged bandwidth for downloading and was designed to allow network deathmatches, so millions of users immediately took up valuable network resources for what seemed a frivolous pursuit to some curmudgeonly BOFHs.
The game was an instant hit -- so much so that within hours of its release admins were banning it from servers to try and cope with the effects of thousands, and then millions of people playing online. It spawned remakes and follow-up games, its own movie (don't bother) and even a glowing endorsement from Bill Gates.
The game was an instant hit -- so much so that within hours of its release admins were banning it from servers to try and cope with the effects of thousands, and then millions of people playing online. It spawned remakes and follow-up games, its own movie (don't bother) and even a glowing endorsement from Bill Gates.
The Doom Technique (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Doom Technique (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Doom Technique (Score:5, Funny)
People look at me funny when I keep pushing against museum walls and going "uh! uh! uh!"
Re:The Doom Technique (Score:5, Funny)
If you left your pants on it would be less weird.
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I assume everyone here knows about the silent BFG trick, right? You push the wall just as you start charging the BFG. The game only allows one noise from you at a time, so the grunt replaces the BFG noise, and then you strafe around the corner and unleash it. Everyone knows to run and hide when they hear the BFG winding up, so the first time you get nailed with a silent one it's a giant WTF.
I know this worked in Doom 2. Not sure about the original Doom. I don't know if I even remember that game with how muc
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"You'll need a stiff drink, when you see the size of these damned trousers!"
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whenever i'm walking and i have to pick up the pace, i unthinkingly make a 'whoosh' sound.
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I keep going up to the curators and asking if they have any quests for me.
Re:The Doom Technique (Score:5, Interesting)
You realize that strategy only actually works for solving traditional "one path" mazes, right? All you need is one cyclic path curving to the left with further spaces inside it, and you'll never reach those additional spaces. A lot of paths and architecture, (not to mention labyrinths, where maze paths might not have any dead ends), will keep many of its secrets against such a strategy.
Still, a not a bad starting point, so long as you're alert to its stark failings.
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Here's a common design where the strategy would fail: https://www.curbed.com/2017/5/... [curbed.com]
A large central courtyard with a building wrapped all the way around it. You walk in the front door, turn right and explore all the outside-facing rooms in the building. But, so long as it's possible to go all the way around the building "ring" inside (say, there's a single circular hallway through the middle of the ring), you'll never reach any of the rooms facing the courtyard, nor the courtyard itself.
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Perhaps you misread my original comment - As I said, the strategy *will* work reliably for "one-path" mazes. So long as you ignore the exit and continue until you reach the start again, you will visit every location in the maze. As soon as you have two paths in a maze reconnect to create a loop though, then the "keep one hand on the wall" strategy can no longer be counted on to give you total coverage, though I *think* it will still find the exit, provided you start at the entrance and not at some random
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Any maze in which you aren't looking for the door outside but the stairs going up or down. Or given game logic, a teleporter.
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You mean Wolfenstein 3D [wikipedia.org].
The original Castle Wolfenstein [wikipedia.org] is an ancient 2D game from 1981, originally for the Apple II.
IPX (Score:5, Interesting)
Played it.
Over IPX.
With multiple players.
Over a parallel port cable.
I kid you not.
There was an old DOS TSR (that I have never been able to find since) that was a packet driver that operated over either a parallel port or serial port daisy-chain from one machine to the next. Wasn't fast, but it was fast enough. Better than serial alone as you could have several machines connected and it was faster. And everyone had parallel ports - I have no idea if EPP or whatever was an option that long ago, but it was faster than the available serial. And you had several of serial/parallel most likely so you had the ports to daisy-chain.
Back when nobody had network-cards in their machines and kid's budgets didn't run to even 10Base2 to play their games - Oh, but dad! - we improvised. I don't even remember how we found it (no Internet for us back then), or what it was called, but we used that little TSR for an awful lot of things that weren't otherwise possible without a proper network card.
The only bit we bought was an ever-increasing daisy-chain of serial and parallel cables using whatever people had discarded or we could find. To this day, I could literally make any combination of 9/25pin M/F to 9/25pin M/F cable for tens of meters of length just from those old cables in my bits box.
I remember it was a faff with whatever the packet driver was, and then having to load some (Novell?) TSR to allow IPX etc. all in a DOS boot config (we had DOS 5, I think, and 4DOS utilities and a bunch of PC Magazine freeware - AMENU - to make a menu just to load up that config and play networked).
Hell, I even remember playing Quake over the same link, but that was only temporarily as only our friend had another machine powerful enough to run that, and then we upgraded to 10Base2 and then 10BaseT not long after.
But I have gamed IPX over parallel port via DOS. People always thing I got it wrong whenever I say that.
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That brings me back.
I played DOOM over IPX, on actual Ethernet, on a Novell Network.
"Shared" the folder so multiple machines could access the executables, and played multi player. On a 10Mbps hub based (not switched) network.
Brought that segment to its knees. :)
Fun times.
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Actually, one of the first few patches to Doom was to reduce network utilization. Apparently the early versions were so good at taking down corporate networks (because home networking was but just a glint back in the day) with traffic that
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Actually, one of the first few patches to Doom was to reduce network utilization. Apparently the early versions were so good at taking down corporate networks (because home networking was but just a glint back in the day) with traffic that workplaces banned its use.
So a later version came out that greatly reduced network utilization so you could at least play it and not take down the network at the same time.
IIRC, the first version used a token ring style "everybody gets all the packets" setup. Then, they realized that Netrek was doing a much better networking job with point to point packets. Us netrek hackers were happy to have contributed to the general video game corruption of the world.
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Interesting! I was young(er) back then, and probably had the version that didn't have the patch.
My teacher and mentor at the time was nice about it, but was also stern in the fact that I really ought not to be doing that.
Slightly off topic, but now all those magical systems that I had (remote at least, never physically saw them) access to when I was younger (PDP's, VAXen, Alpha, mainframes, etc) I can emulate on a Raspberry Pi. Most of the time tech doesn't amaze me, but stuff like that sure does.
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IPX was not the only protocol to have that problem with games. Some other early multiplayer games used broadcast UDP/IP which had the same problem.
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+1 for network ARCNET doom matches via IPX. Half the day was spent troubleshooting :)
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Played it.
Over IPX.
With multiple players.
Over a parallel port cable.
Up hill (both ways).
...
In the snow.
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Yep, it was the novell ipx driver. Got a 3.5" disk with that critter downstairs. Remember all those hours you spent trying to cram basic drivers below the 640KB line and then force other things into high memory, but still reserving enough space to play the game? 4MB of memory...what a shit show. Now we worry about computers that don't have 8GB or 16GB as standard for simple desktop, and games that are 50GB-100GB in size.
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Computer hardware was still scary back then. We could have bought a 3.3V 486 (DX/4 100, DX/4 120) and put it in the 5V motherboard, to great prejudice. Not that I knew. Someone DID this, not in the same decade so he had fun watching it burn. It still worked after putting the original CPU back anyhow.
Yep, remember a lot of that. I also remember the "volt down" period in the mid-to-late 90's when things went from 5v dimm slots to 3.3v, and in some really screwed up cases 4v. I didn't find computer hardware scary, more that there was so many requirements to "get it to work" I'd line it up with the first cars in terms of complexity. When it worked, it worked well. Hell, when was the last time you needed to use jumpers, dips witches, or break out cross-board jumper wires in order to make hardware work.
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Back in my day, we had to write our own games, in the snow!
At uni there was a 3-D vector FPS on HP Chipmunk workstations called Tunnel. You where in a maze, with the view being just the perspective outline of the walls, and the other player was a cube outline with a tetrahedron on the front side. So there would only be about 12 straight lines on the screen, except when the other player was present,
We wrote our own version on DOS PCs (8086s! not ATs!) and linked 3 PCs with serial ports so 3 of us could deat
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Thank you - 8088 is totally correct.
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> "But I have gamed IPX over parallel port via DOS. People always thing I got it wrong whenever I say that."
I was about to tell you how wrong you are until I saw the rest of your post, pretty cool stuff!
We got our first 10mbit network cards due to doom, man adding that third player in my group of normally 2 was hectic but worth it.
I remember those days fondly (Score:2)
We built a COMring [sunet.se] cable, which let you run a token-ring like network over a specially constructed serial cable or over a null modem cable (if you only have 2 nodes). Then installed an IPX packet driver in order to run the game. at 57.6k and decent UARTs (16550) it played fine.
For parallel we ran LapLink cables [wikipedia.org], a type of parallel cable like you described. And transferred files with LANtastic [wikipedia.org] or Laplink. Eventually a few people got 10Base2 cards and would act as gateways for those of us without network card
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Was that ParaDOOM like in 1994?
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IPX is not routable but we found a way to bridge and tunnel it between where I lived and a friend's house so we could hold dual LAN parties.
Music for the occasion (Score:2)
I have only two words to mark this occasion. (Score:5, Funny)
IDKFA IDDQD.
I can't remember my mom's birthday but I still know those two codes. :-/
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IDSPISPOPD
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Don't forget IDGAF. ;-)
Quake Fulfilled Doom's Promise (Score:5, Interesting)
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Quake had network gameplay with Quakeworld>
Technically, Quake had network gameplay before Quakeworld, it just used TCP rather than UDP, so it was awfully laggy when moving.
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Sorry, no.
Don't get me wrong, Quake was a massive achievement by ID, but Doom was seismic when it launched. There was simply nothing like this available before.
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Quake had true 3D levels that can pass over one another. Quake had 3D adversaries. Quake had network gameplay with Quakeworld. Quake had OpenGL support with GLQuake that launched the GPU world, really starting with the Voodoo 1. Quake had translucent water, which was amazing the first time I ever saw it. And lastly, Quake is still the bar that any small platform must aspire to by answering the question, "Does it run Quake."
Man I always though Quake was garbage and that was when I stopped playing FPS games.
*seemed* like a frivolous pursuit? (Score:3)
Really, it only *seemed* like a frivolous use of network resources? In exactly what way is playing Doom, or any game generally, not *actually* a frivolous pursuit?
Not that I'm opposed to frivolous pursuits, far from it - but if you're making the implied claim that playing a game *isn't* completely frivolous, a little evidence would be appreciated. Or at least a decent argument. Heck, even an anecdote would be a big step up from making such a ridiculous claim completely unsupported.
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Not exactly skills that have significant application in the real world, unless you're remote piloting a drone and navigating with only it's camera for reference.
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Frivolous doesn't mean valueless though - it just means unimportant and/or lacking in seriousness.
Re:*seemed* like a frivolous pursuit? (Score:4, Interesting)
One could say that it's only 99% frivolous.
And one would be wrong.
Hacking Doom, Quake, and UT taught me to code. I wouldn't have hacked on them if I wasn't playing them.
Building levels for them gave me a way to visualize 3D environments that I later found out not a lot of people have. Not sure if it's cause and effect, but it definitely helped strengthen that skill.
Working on larger levels and mods taught me how to be a program manager, a skill which is enormously useful the older I get. Hacking on these taught me the value of documentation and code comments, especially as I began working with other like-minded individuals.
Doing all this taught me about emergent behavior in a way I could never have learned otherwise. Now I really understand how a system design can reinforce or depress user behavior, and I consider that when designing systems.
All that because I played games so much I couldn't help tinkering with them. I'd never had the drive to do any of that in my teens and early 20s if I hadn't been obsessed with the games. Hell, I wouldn't even have known that such things were possible. I bet a solid 50% of my success in life came from those games.
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It wasn't a big jump from Quake to Counter-Strike, and Counter-Strike (or near replicas) ended up training real troops. For real combat. With real weapons. Real wounds. Real blood. Real gravestones.
What hasn't been pointed out here is that Quake wasn't just innovative for true 3D, but had pretty good 3D physics as well. In particular, you could bounce the grenade off walls and ceilings at different angles and velocities in all kinds of unpredictable ways. I wasn't that big into rocket jumping, but I think t
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Humans enjoy entertainment and games as forms of engagement just as they enjoy work and getting things done. I don't think it's a controversial stance to say that video games, board games, sports, or other types of games have value.
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Agreed - that's a large part of why I'm a fan of frivolous pursuits. It doesn't make them any less frivolous though. If a frivolous pursuit had *no* value, nobody would waste their time on them, and we wouldn't have a word for it.
Definition of frivolous
1a : of little weight or importance She thinks window shopping is a frivolous activity.
b : having no sound basis (as in fact or law) a frivolous lawsuit
2a : lacking in seriousness a frivolous conversation
b : marked by unbecoming levity was criticized for hi
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Why would enjoying yourself be considered frivolous at all, other than by a badly understood protestant work ethic?
We're in life to make the best of ourselves and be happy, and playing games (especially social games, like networked Doom) is a powerful way to make yourself happy, thus a very transcendent activity. In the heath death of the universe, it won't matter if you spent your time having fun and enjoying life, or rather working yourself to death; but it will have made a deep difference to you.
Only if
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I think we agree on general life philosophy on this (though I'm unconvinced that the Protestants did) .
However, consider this - while enjoying yourself is important, any specific activity that contributes to that goal is not - it could be readily replaced with some other enjoyable activity. Contrast that with farming, blacksmithing, and most other "productive" activity, where the end product of that specific activity *is* important.
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it could be readily replaced with some other enjoyable activity
Maybe, but you consider this: there's a point where the activity you practice begins to define who you are. If you pursued different leisure activities, you would practice different skills, and meet different people. I wouldn't be the same nor have the same friends if instead of attending my roleplaying group sessions, I indulged in tennis lessons on weekends. Tell me how frivolous is that.
You can get the field farmed and iron forged with the th
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So does the relevance to myself and any other being that doesn't exist on a cosmic scale of space and time.
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Not entirely frivolous. How many people learned a few things about configuring DOS or setting up networks while trying to make a game work? How many people wound up with a career in computers thanks to the gateway drug known as level editing?
New levels (Score:2)
Anyway, John Romero will be releasing 9 new levels [romerogames.ie] to commemorate the 25th anniversary.
Epilogue (Score:2)
Later on Doom was fully embraced by the BoFH community as an admin tool.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/7923
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Dialup (Score:2)
Doom on floppy disk (Score:2)
I had the floppy disk shareware version for whatever it was, came on a few floppies.
I think it was that first level or so, but it ran amazingly on my old Pentium 90.
There was an Arts/Rec center up on Custer Hill in Fort Riley, KS that me and several other older guys would book time at to play LAN matches of Doom II a few years later. One of us had a map editor where we made our own levels to fight each other in.
Frivilous? If it was why did we take it so goddamn seriously?
Adapt or doomed (Score:3)
Got a tricked-out 486 from Gateway mail order, computers from cow country.
It didn't run Doom. Called their customer service, "We don't consider Doom an essential application to support."
Back it went. I'm sure that attitude changed shortly.
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Hmm... I remember playing Doom on a 386. It ran at about 5fps, which was enough for me to get through the whole "shareware" version I loaded up on 3.5 floppies.
Don't forget Total Conversions & Mods! (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forgot that Doom also gave us:
* Total Conversions or "themed" levels, such as Aliens, Barney, etc. /gamerule keepInventory true
* Mods -- the ability to change core gameplay rules. e.g. Minecraft allows "house rules" such as:
* In-game map which was also awesome. (Looking at you Vermintide 2!)
I'm reminded that the entire FPS genre seems to have regressed. This commentary of FPS map design 1993 vs 2010 [imgur.com] succinctly summarizes the problem of how everything has being script / trigger driven. In some games the dam loading screen takes ages (Gran Turismo 6).
It is also pathetic that FPS no longer ship with map editors. Worse, DLCs only come with ~3 maps. Hell, even Age of Empires 2, a 19 year old game STILL has new maps being made. e.g. The "Nothing" theme [youtube.com] is currently popular.
And then game devs wonder why no one plays their game after 5 years. /sarcasm But ooh, shiny!
--
Enlightenment, noun and verb; The Journey is more important then the Destination of becoming aware of a higher perspective.
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I wish I had mod points today. Great comments!
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I was a heavy doom/quake mapper in the D2 era and even up into Q3Arena (which presaged that iD was becoming an engine-builder, not a game-maker, sigh....) but already it was pretty clear that the amount of work was surpassing "hobbyist" work levels except for people who had literally nothing else to do with their lives. Now to compete with professional product the art, the textures, the models...it's TEAMS of people you're competing against. It's not just building some interesting geometry that keeps tria
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The number of L4D maps, such as I Hate Mountains [ihatemountains.com] and Portal 2 maps would disagree with your sentiments. :-)
Has content creation gotten exceedingly more complex? Definitely. But I wouldn't write off entire communities just yet. It all comes down to tools devs provide for end users to create content.
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It is also pathetic that FPS no longer ship with map editors. Worse, DLCs only come with ~3 maps. Hell, even Age of Empires 2, a 19 year old game STILL has new maps being made. e.g. The "Nothing" theme [youtube.com] is currently popular.
For a long time, 3D maps were insanely complex to produce, far beyond that of the average gamer. Also tools to make them were expensive and proprietary.
However with many games being open world build-em-ups a la Minecraft, the tools to make custom maps are now the game itself. The biggest problem is that engines are not quite up to snuff.
And then game devs wonder why no one plays their game after 5 years. /sarcasm But ooh, shiny!
For game publishers, this is a feature, not a bug. They don't want you playing Call of Snorefare 432 which was released six months ago when they've reskinned it and rele
Good educational experience (Score:2)
This games release also pushed untold numbers of us to learn what ethernet was, what IPX was, how to configure DOS autoexec.bat and config.sys files to eek out enough memory to play them.
Or even how to perform basic PC hardware maintenance like upgrading video cards, processors, etc .. if not for the fact that we _needed_ to do those things to play the game better than your friend.
IPX (Score:2)
I remember as an Netware admin, a bunch of us built a Netware server with multiple NIC in it to segment the network, just so the department could play Doom/Quake/Descent on the LAN without noticeably slowing down the office.
This was of course in the day before "every port is a switch, every port is it's own collision domain".
Barney Doom (Score:2)
Nothing like going down a corridor blasting purple dinosaurs that are "singing" "I love you, you love me..."
Blackbook on Doom's game engine (Score:2)
Movie (Score:2)
It spawned remakes and follow-up games, its own movie (don't bother)
Was I the only that actually enjoyed the FPS sequence in the Doom movie? The rest of the movie was "meh" though.
Broadcast packets - bad article or summary (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason the first versions of DOOM brought down networks was its use of broadcast packets, it was patched out in later versions.
Those packets would repeat across routers to other locations over wan links and more, total network mayhem back then. I dont recall the game using any special amount of bandwidth at all beyond the broadcast packet problem.
Once it was patched it was mostly benign on a local segment.
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The reason the first versions of DOOM brought down networks was its use of broadcast packets, it was patched out in later versions.
There was one specific problem those broadcast packets caused. HP network printers on IPX. Their tiny little CPUs couldn't handle that much traffic not meant for them, so they clogged up and nobody on the lab network could print while a game was under way. We got yelled at more than once to shut down so some poor sod could print their term paper. Printing done, we started right back up again.
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Not just HP printers. Any machine which handled broadcast/multicast packets in software had problems.
The first versions not only used broadcast packets, but they sent them as fast as the sender could handle, which was far faster than many receivers could handle. And everyone on the same network segment was a receiver.
Long Distance Doom (Score:2)
When he came in to visit family, I rented a computer for him ($50/day!), hacked up an AT modem initialization string that required no dial tone, and ran a null phone line from one machine to the other so we could play. That was so much fun.
I read a boo
Anyone temember the doom admin mod? (Score:2)
It linked processes to monsters, so kill a monster means kill a process. I think the cpu usage determined monster speed as well, but can't recall.
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PIDdoom .. careful what you kill, else crash the host.
They should link Doom to Elite (Score:2)
Then Orcs can storm your ship, or you can storm the space dredger filled with them. Not sure which would be the more fun.
Ah Laplink! (Score:2)
IDDQD (Score:2)
IDKFA
IDSPISPOPD
IDBEHOLD
ok, it's been to long, I cant remember any more. Do I get to keep my nerd card?
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What fell the Amiga was clinging to the A500 long after it has passed its prime, and the incompatibility to newer models. Not its 3D-capabilities, or lack thereof. The PCs of the time were not any better at displaying 3D graphics, dedicated 3D cards came much later when 3D actually became a thing.
Furthermore, A500s were sold as "as is", hardwired and hardly upgradeable. You could plug a memory extension into it, you had an "expansion port", where upgrading it with anything cost way more than it was worth an
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The 500 was intended to be a cost reduced version, except that the stuff you gave up really wasn't worth the smaller cost. But remember that Apple made similar mistakes, not wanting upgradeability early on (similar to the NeXT).
I liked the Amiga 1000 best. It didn't look boxy like PCs or the A2000, and didn't look like a C64 or Apple II like the 500 did. I did get the A2000 later for more upgradeability and a hard drive. I do remember some major developers not wanting the hard drive and instead got more
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there was nothing wrong with the 500, it fit the market it servered perfectly.
besides some extra ram and an extra floppy drive almost nobody needed to expand their 500 for what they were doing with it.
the price difference between the 500 and the 2000 was huge, the amiga wouldn't have been as popular as it had been if it wasn't for the 500.
amgia stuck to custem chips to much and os in rom (Score:4, Informative)
amgia stuck to custom chips to much and os in (non flash) rom
Commodore's fate was sealed (Score:2)
by dwarfing economies of scale that were emerging even as the C64 was at full strength. Motorola was taken out the same way. IBM even suffered. There's many others like DEC, Sun, SGI, Atari. Apple all but died under the onslaught. They only survived by filling a gaping hole in music sales that the music exec's still can't get their heads around. The Web enabled Apple to shift out of general computing.
It's a chicken or egg problem. Everyone wants to use the same software. So you can't design hardware
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Motorola kept going in the workstation market. The home and PC markets were mostly toys, for simplistic uses or light business. It wasn't until NT4 era that workstation use started declining, and the Pentium was the final nail.
When the Amiga was around, the PC clones were utterly lousy. You can't even say it had a bad architecture because it really had no architecture instead it had hacks. I remember later in early 90s graduate school that one student lobbied to get a 386 PC into the lab because he said i
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Not at all, those were the real-deal SparcStations. A friend at a company once got a bunch of Sun 386i's for the QA group and everyone hated those with a passion because they were so incredibly slow.
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I wouldn't call them being cross developed, but ported to the other System.
Your examples really needed a crisp 80 column text display, those displays were best on the Black and White (often Amber or Green) screens that just allowed for higher resolutions without color bleeding. Businesses didn't use PC's with Monochrome displays just because they were cheaper then Color screens, but because they displayed text much easier.
Even Apple at the time, for its windows and graphics did Back and White monitors, vs
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Back in 82 I saw a Sun monitor for Sun 1 workstations. That totally blew all other displays out of the water in terms of a crisp display, and the TTYs were so much better than a PC. Yes it cost a lot more but it a did such a good job.
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The Engineers probably could had made a better system. But in 1993 you will need to fight off the momentum that Microsoft had, with its army of IBM and IBM Compatible PC's all running MS DOS and Windows 3.1x. With the 386 and 486 chips there was a set of 32bit systems that a middle class family could afford.
Yes Amiga could had made a better system, but all the software was for PC's. During that time you had to go to the Store and buy box copies of software, order copies over the mail, (much lower case shift
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We were lucky in Silicon Valley, there was a store there that was essentially dedicated to the Amiga. (It's a KFC now)
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PCs were immortal, that's why it was successful (and why it was a terrible mistake for IBM). Thousands of PC builders and hundreds of component manufactures failed in the 80's and 90's. A PC company fails, two pop up to replace it. Commodore, Atari, and others were just one company holding together an architecture, they didn't have the luxury of failing.
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Not just selling them. But building them up from components. The PC market grew organically from a cottage industry of PC clones. People who cloned other hardware, like Apple //e had a much harder time because not everything was off-the-shelf from component suppliers. Making an Amiga clone would be really hard for example, because of the rather complicated custom set of chips for it. A crappy little PC clone with CGA was a bunch of chips out of a catalog from Intel and Motorola.
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CGA was pretty common in a narrow range of years of the 1980's because it could output to a TV and users could skip buying a monitor. EGA ended up being big during the 286 era, but in terms of units didn't really sell that many. Budget machines (8088 and 8086) were shipping with CGA cards, including "SuperCGA" that provides some non-standard additional set of modes. Hercules was very popular for budget conscious people who wanted good text mode performance. The graphics of HGC was a novelty but usually not
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It's the truth. The old Workbench 1.2 easter egg "We made Amiga, they fucked it up" was the story of Commodore's ownership of Amiga pretty much.
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C128 was designed around the perceived needs of business users. But Commodore was a gaming platform first and business users weren't really flocking to it. I guess if it were only about technology and price a C128 (1985) was cheaper than a an IBM PC AT (1984), but horribly inadequate in comparison when it came to running business software.
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It looks like he hasn't posted in over a decade.
https://slashdot.org/~John+Car... [slashdot.org]
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The size of the Doom download had nothing to do with the network issue that early versions of Doom caused.
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Broa... [doomwiki.org]