>put together a pentium pc to play old dos games
>install dos, get mouse.com, and fire up doom 1.9
>there's no way to disable mouse movement on the vertical axis
What moron decided to make the mouse move you forward while also aiming on the horizontal axis and then not even give you an option to turn it off? Surely they must have known this was an unusable control scheme even in 1993? Did they at any point even try playing their own game with a mouse?
Oh zoomzoom.
>Surely they must have known this was an unusable control scheme even in 1993? Did they at any point even try playing their own game with a mouse?
reminder that Dual Stick controls that are DEFAULT now for console FPS games were once considered "utterly unusable garbage"
reminder that even earliest games where you can do WASD + mouse came with arrow keys by default and/or you needed to enable mouse look with a console command
>arrow keys by default
This is as it should be. Using letters for directions was a mistake, unless you mean "N", "E","S", and "W" for text adventure games.
You must feel pretty special, anon.
>reminder that Dual Stick controls that are DEFAULT now for console FPS games were once considered "utterly unusable garbage"
that was literally a single article by some noname homosexual
not that gamepads are any good for FPS games, but "one hand/thumb for movement and other hand/thumb for lookaround" is the most versatile/unrestricting setup
>that was literally a single article by some noname homosexual
But many FPS used different options with dual sticks and didn't even offer that option.
Then tell me why everyone thinks that FPS controls are bad on the N64 even though the use that same control scheme
Is this some kind of bait thread?
you use the arrow keys to move forward, and strafe L R , and the mouse to fire/open and turn left/right. ive been doing this since the 90s. what is the vertical axis garbage
if you haven't beaten doom mouse-only you haven't truly played the game
>he doesn't know about NOVERT
>a hack that was created in 2003 is the only way to make the game playable
So you're telling me that for the first 10 years of doom's existence nobody realized how unplayable it was? Was everyone playing the game with only a keyboard during the 90s?
I infact remember myself playing with the forward mousemovment (the default), back then we didn't know any better, and WASD was unheard of.
It bothered me so much in the 90's that I played keyboard only
On the other hand I'm pretty sure there were novert solutions much older than 2003, that one just happened to be the one uploaded to the repository
We played every fps with arrow keys, lshift, lctrl and spacebar with maybe something awkward like pgup and pgdn to look up and down and [ and ] to cycle through items. Any mouse controls were thrown in as some freak alternative that no one used and I remember when mouse and wasd was introduced having a really hard time adjusting to it. I think that was unreal for me or maybe quake 2.
my novert is dated august 2000
wasd wasn't the standard until CS took off
one look at build games will tell you that people weren't picky about mouse handling
I never even thought about using mouse.
I think they just didn't think it a big problem, even if the game plays objectively better without mouse movement. It made far more sense for Wolfenstein 3D.
Anyway, if you wanna play the original .exe with it off, get something like novert.exe or plain pick one of the rollers out of the ball mouse you're presumably using.
Or use a sourceport like Chocolate Doom or Crispy Doom
There's other tricks, also I'm pretty sure the first release of the Boom sourceport was a few years before 2000.
Mind, people would use tricks for enabling Always Run as well, so they wouldn't have to actively hold down a key for that, both hardware and software tricks.
I have this vague memory of being able to edit your config and giving the vertical mouse axis an overflow value to disable it, but I can't seem to find it.
Anyway, lots of people just plain didn't play Doom with a mouse because their computers simply didn't have enough memory to run Doom and mouse drivers at the same time, with some not transitioning to mouse later even when possible (and as some replies state, some didn't because of the vertical axis). Some played with gamepads or joysticks.
Slightly janky mouse can get used to though, and mouse players would come to readily be served by mouse players in DM, with or without tricks for fixing it, because it's still way faster and more precise.
Just about every port with mouse support, be they the fan made ones or the new official ones, let you play with saner mouse functionality, so the for a very long time it has been the defacto standard.
We played only with the keyboard. No one even thought to use the mouse at the time and no one EVER complained they couldn't. It simply wasn't a thing yet. Arrow keys for moving and no one I knew knew about strafing in doom. I didn't even know it had it until about 2 years ago. The game is designed around these limitations and it plays fine. You don't even need strafing.
I'm a bit of a doom purist, however I did love the mouse controls for brutal doom and idk if I can go back
this. this is the reason the most difficulties are so easy. the average skill ceiling was much lower at release. The game is balanced for keyboard play. Shit, I remember now maybe beating a good portion of dark forces KB only and it had lots of control options.
The only shooters that you might have played before doom was shit like blake stone and wolfenstein which were kb as well.
Those mouse controls are inherent to ZDoom ports going back to the 90s
Yes, that's part of how you can be so ridiculously fast and agile in Wolf 3D
>he searched for NOVERT and came up with the upload date to a specific site as its "creation" date
NOVERT has existed almost as long as Doom has, child. Jesus fricking christ.
Also, yes, you can remap the fricking keys, kids. SETUP.EXE.
Fricking children. God fricking damn. It amazes me how fricking ignorant you are of something you pretend to be so into.
>This TSR is pretty popular among DMers and speed runners but hasn't been uploaded to the archive to this day even though it's been available on an assortment of lesser DOOM sites for a while. Uploaded by Miguel Folatelli (aka myk helnyte, [email protected].) Place it in /utils/misc/.
>pretty popular
>hasn't been uploaded to the archive to this day
>been available on an assortment of lesser DOOM sites for a while
literally from the readme, you fricking moron
How is the experience different than dosbox?
Dosbox is fake and gay. It can't accurately recreate the fm synthesis of a real yamaha opl chip. It doesn't emulate the seek time of a real floppy or hard drive. It doesn't make the sounds of old drives and cpu fans. Most importantly it can't create the superior picture of a real crt monitor.
Not sure about the sound card but those can be attached to a modern PC (usb floppy drive and hdmi to vga cable). Maybe modern PCI-e fm synthesizers exist.
I just use a external Roland MIDI module, works perfectly fine with DOSBox over USB
For PCM, DOSBox with a modern sound card / DAC sounds better than any old sound card anyways, the only problem is MIDI or OPL emulation
You know there are special camps for people as fricking gay as you to get help, right? You should sign up for one.
There are tons of things virtual machines and emulators do not get right. For instance, there's an interesting quirk on real hardware that you cannot reproduce: if you hold keyboard keys for too long, you will eventually overflow a circular buffer faster than the program is able to process, which will freeze the machine (you get a beep telling you to slow down because the program isn't done emptying the buffer). It may sound great that you don't have this issue in DosBOX, but it also means that they are not emulating the behavior of the keyboard/bios interrupt properly.
The few virtual machines I tried to run DOS on failed to process DMA transfers (Direct Memory Access); it's a technique that allows a program to send content of memory straight to a hardware component without passing through the CPU first, it's commonly used to transfer audio data to the sound card.
These are complex machines with tons of sub systems working together, and as useful and nice as something like DosBOX is, it's also not very accurate. It will allow way too many things an actual machine wouldn't allow (so you can't really develop a program under DosBOX and expect it to work flawlessly on real hardware). The development team also repeatedly said that DosBOX was designed to run certain programs specifically and if it manages to run more, it's purely incidental. That's why they advise not to run "important" programs (old client database) via DosBOX.
>f you hold keyboard keys for too long, you will eventually overflow a circular buffer faster than the program is able to process, which will freeze the machine (you get a beep telling you to slow down because the program isn't done emptying the buffer).
Huh. So that's what that was.
fix it then
DMA on PC was always incredibly broken. You HAD to use DMA to transfer sound data to a soundblaster because it had no onboard buffer and so the popularity of the card meant that mobo manufacturers made sure their broken ass DMA at least worked with soundblasters. But any other usage was generally exceptionally broken. Programmers would opt never to use DMA, instead preferring to tie up the CPU because it just wasn't worth the bug reports from all those people with PC Chips motherboards who would never believe it was their "100% (yeah right) IBM compatible" motherboard causing the problem.
Given that simple fact, it's not really surprising that VMs fail to do DMA in the way you want because there was so many broken implementations and programs that were written with the intent of running on those broken implementations that there's really no "correct" standard to apply, just a series of known common hacks and emulations of those hacks.
>It can't accurately recreate the fm synthesis of a real yamaha opl chip
I use DosBox and emulate sound blaster or PC speaker.
>Dosbox is fake and gay. It can't accurately recreate the fm synthesis of a real yamaha opl chip.
There are modern plugin in devices with real OPL2/3 chips you can pass through direct to dosbox. And you know what people have found? They are basically indistinguishable from DOSBox's standard OPL emulation, barring variations in the manufacturing that differ unit to unit.
The problem is that people who grew up with PCs didn't use real Adlib cards, they often didn't even use real soundblasters either. They used cheap clone cards with iffy soundblaster/emulation compatibility, connected to tinny shit desktop speakers. It's not that DOSBox is inaccurate, far from it, it's that they don't know what it was really supposed to sound like and what they want is what THEIR crappy shitbox sounded like in 1990.
>The problem is that people who grew up with PCs didn't use real Adlib cards, they often didn't even use real soundblasters either.
Wat?! Back then for me it was SoundBlaster or deal with the cone PC speaker noises. I love the sound of OPL2, and remember the SB (I think it was 2.0) connected up to a large speaker part of a stereo system, where I could hear the pop before the sound of Ultima 7's Guardian ready to frighten me with the booming sound of a Texan voice actor. It was magical, and that's how I remembered it, which is why I prefer OPL2 over 3.
chocolate doom is better than dosbox if you want to play on a modern machine with vanilla feel.
Chocolate doom has input lag. No source port of doom running on a modern computer is lag free because they all have to use modern graphics api's that inherently add input lag, with lcd latency on top of that. The only way to play doom lag free is on original hardware connected to a crt monitor.
>Chocolate doom has input lag
Imperceptible lag, the game is still incredibly fluid and responsive in the major ports, not even the most HRT'd speedrunners would notice.
If you wanna see bad input lag, turn on vertical sync in the new official console ports, that shit cripples you BAAAD. It's subtle yet significant, you really will struggle to actually respond as fast as you normally would.
Vanilla Doom moves you backwards and forwards when you use the mouse. This can be adjusted to, but it's ultimately less comfortable than just pure and clean horizontal mouse turning.
It honestly makes frickloads of sense for Wolfenstein 3D, because all terrain is perfectly flat with perfect 90 degree walls. There's no rough terrain, stage hazards, or fine geometry, so there's basically nothing to fumble or get stuck on, and there's no acceleration or deceleration, when you stop moving you stop instantly and on the spot, unlike Doom. If you use the mouse for turning and moving in Wolf3D together with the keyboard, you can move like absolutely goddamn greased lightning, extremely fast and precise maneuvers which you just can't pull in Doom.
It's incredibly smooth and thrilling, and I'm convinced it's THE intended way to beat Wolf3D on I Am Death Incarnate.
i'm pretty sure most early id games stack the movement too. I remember using kb+mouse to get some crazy movement speed in catacombs.
Doom was a laggy b***h back in the day on real hardware too. PC games either wrote directly into the VGA buffer or they would double buffer for 1/70s of lag. But here was doom that not only TRIPLE buffered but every movement the player made was subject to acceleration so any visible movement would come several frames AFTER you pressed the key on top of the triple buffer lag. The fact that chocolate doom is adding USB, Direct3D, compositor and LCD lag on top of that is kinda missing the forest for the trees...
So Chocolate Doom on a 21st century PC is equal or faster than Vanilla on a 486 in terms of input lag, no matter how you slice it?
imagine not using BOOM
also because there is no way to disable vertical axis. i assume it's cannon of telling (You) that you meant to play it with keyboard only, so man the frick up and play like it was intended
That was normal.
Why would you play Doom with a mouse?
This. Nobody I knew seriously played FPS games with a mouse until mlook became the default thing.
i've played like a zillion hours of doom and never used a mouse lol. Same with duke nukem 3d
Then why do the demos that play on the main menu use mouse aiming?
I'm not familiar with that, but there is video of the game being tested just before release and they're using keyboard. I used to have a video as evidence but it appears to be dead. Thanks israeliteTube.
Now that I think about it, why is OP going through so much effort to recreate an experience they obviously never had in the first place?
Nothing wrong with that. I like playing old 8-bit computer games despite having missed out on their heyday (I sometimes remap 'up' to the b button on my controller). If OP wants to enjoy old games on original hardware, more power to him.
It just plays and feels better. Ask Romero about it. Try playing Final Doom or deathmatch without a mouse, it's not very fun unless you're an absolute keyboard only pro, and you're still at a disadvantage, even the best keyboard only speedrunners are clear about this.
The demo recordings that play in the attract mode are recorded inputs by the people who played them at the end of development. Aside from actually being able to look at the recorded inputs in the file to see what they did exactly and when, you can see it live in how some of them move, the smooth and fast turning that stops on a dime when Romero played is unmistakable. There is also photos/videos of guys like Romero using a mouse in playtesting.
Doom was unquestionably made for playing with a mouse, but it was also very much made for playing keyboard only, with gamepads, and joysticks. They clearly wanted the gameplay to be widely accessible.
The fact that the original episodes aren't actually very hard speaks for that, just about anyone can best them on UV with no mouse if they focus.
You don't play Doom with a mouse, it's made for keyboard.
>What moron decided to make the mouse move you forward while also aiming on the horizontal axis and then not even give you an option to turn it off?
I answer your question with a question of my own: What moron thinks a mouse is necessary for a game without separate aiming controls?
This level of roleplay is hilarious.
>Okay it’s 1994, you come to my house with this snes and a doom cart and I’ll be on my pentium playing doom with keyboard only and ready to taunt you. I’ll have kool-aids and pizza rolls and we can go to school together tomorrow
Keyboard only felt like shit even back then. I played keyboard only for like 5 minutes before going back to using the mouse to move on the vertical axis. It gives you a level of precision that even WSAD doesn't. When I replay Wolf3D and Doom nowadays, I use a sourceport, but I actually leave on the mouse movement as well for the reason I mentioned above: precision.
To this day I still play Doom the way me and everybody I knew at the time played it, keyboard only
> ">" and "<" for strafing
>Arrows for turning
>Right CTRL fires
>Spacebar opens doors
Takes some getting used to, as you have to constantly switch your right index finger between the left arrow and the fire button, but I still play it like that
why not just use middle finger on left, ring finger on up/down, pinky on right and pointer for CTRL/shoot. No need to lift pointer off of left.
Should I get a new machine that has 95/XP for playing retro games? I had a Macintosh as a kid so I don't really know much about old PCs. I know about VirtualBox but I'd rather not go that route
Get used to it m8. Being able to move with the mouse gives you super precise movement when you want it. I even bind a key to temporarily toggle it back on (replacing mouselook) in modern source ports. Frick running down narrow walkways like on doom2 map24 with WASD alone. Unusable my bum, I think people who used novert were fricking themselves out of getting good.
Mapping movement to the mouse never made sense to me either, but I did learn to play first-person games with WASD and a mouse first. I never really considered that the analog movement it gives you could be used as an advantage.
Just use the 'novert' utility.
https://www.doomworld.com/files/file/12039-novert/
Always played it with mouse.
Never found vertical movement to be a problem.
Also never really used strafe and moved with just the mouse, with the right button binded to move forward.
Same with Build games, Quake and Jedi Knight before discovering WASD
You just used a mouse where the wheel for the vertical axis was so full of dust bunnies it didn't work anymore.
You could probably even stick something in there so the little wheel won't rotate.
I had a few mice where the wheels just snapped into place and you could pop them up without even opening the case. And, of course, there are all kinds of more sophisticated solutions. Software and hardware. OPs problem is the wetware.
holy shit just get novert moron