How to Play Classic Doom 1 and 2

How to Play Doom 2 on a modern PC

Ok, so you want to play Doom 1 or 2?

You'll need a few things to get up and running.

First off, I should mention that Doom 1 and 2 are Dos based games. Since the vast majority of people are running a modern operating system like Windows XP or Windows Vista (or Linux?) this means that 99% of people will be unable to play Vanilla Doom.

Don't worry though, you wouldn't want to play Classic Doom today anyway.

320x200 resolution is so early ninety's.

So what do you do?

Answer: Download a "Doom Source Port".

Many people are unaware that Classic Doom has evolved immensely since John Carmack made the Doom source code public back in 1997. The freelance doom community took the code that John Carmack released and have consistently worked on it since and created what are known as "Source Ports".

Many "Source Ports" contain features found in modern games such as:

• Vertical mouselook (Doom was horizontally constricted)
• Support for high resolutions
• High resolution textures
• True 3D
• 3D models instead of sprites
• Online multiplayer

The list goes on and on..

The bottomline? Doom is an even better experience today, than it was in the early ninety's. There's nothing better than relaxing to some coop play with friends on a rainy day, or sweating over a heart pounding deathmatch in high res graphics with true vertical mouse-look.

Ok enough rambling, how do I play?

There are several flavors of "Doom" out there today. Some Doom source ports have better graphics, some have better functionality, some support better modifications, but all are unique in their own way.

For single-player stability , I highly suggest using Gzdoom.

• Download Gzdoom (Last Updated: June 27th 2011)

Installing Gzdoom

Simply extract gzdoom to your Doom 1 or 2 directory, and you should be good to go. You can play custom wads (levels) using the run command (in Vista windows key + R)
"C:\enteryourdoompath\gzdoom.exe -file "name of custom wad"

or

by dragging the wad file over gzdoom.exe.

Note: Make sure your custom wads are located in the root directory of your doom directory and you should be good to go.

I'll be updating this post really soon to teach you how to get multiplayer up and running, believe it or not, Doom still has quite a following and there are people playing online all the time!