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Glad you mentioned DOOM! Sometimes people forget that DOOM supported multiplayer as early as December 1993, via a serial line and February 1994 for IPX networki

Glad you mentioned DOOM! Sometimes people forget that DOOM supported multiplayer as early as December 1993, via a serial line and February 1994 for IPX networking. 4 player games on a LAN in 1994! On release, TCP/IP wasn't supported at all, but as the Internet took off, that was solved as well. I remember testing an early-ish version of the 3rd party iDOOM TCP setup driver from my dorm room (10 base T connection) when I was supposed to be in class, and it was a true game changer.

jandrese 1y ago
What was even more amazing is you could daisy chain serial ports on computers to get multiplayer Doom running. One or more of those links could even be a phone modem. Downside is that your framerate was capped to the person with the slowest computer, and there was always that guy with the 486sx25 who got invited to play.
- bombcar 1y ago
  Or slave two copies to yours and get "side view" which was only supported for a few releases IIRC - https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Three_screen_mode https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Three_screen_mode
  - badocr 1y ago
    Yes, Doom with multi-monitors! There's (at least) one video on Youtube showing it in action with 3 monitors plus a fourth one with the map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3NQQ7bPf6U#t=1798.333333 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3NQQ7bPf6U#t=1798.333333
  - bigjimmyk3 1y ago
    Someone tried running that in one of the campus computer labs when I was a student, and the (probably misconfigured) IPX routers amplified it into... a campus-wide outage. Seems weird to me, but that's what the big sign on the door said the next day. The perpetrator was never caught.