Ports back to DOS
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From what I’ve gathered, the source of the DOS version of Doom hasn’t been released, or at least wasn’t in the 1997 source release. So folks ported the Linux version back to DOS. Today I learned that at least some of these are still maintained!
Doom Legacy is the one I recall spending the most time with. It even has split screen, TCP/IP multiplayer, and bots! Though not sure how the experience would compare to modern OS ports like Zandronum or Odamex. Still, impressive one can get most of the modern features on an OS that has been in stasis since the mid 90s. [Correction: Doom Legacy’s last DOS support was v1.41 from 2003, though it does have impressive features there too.]
Here is the Doom World’s list of Doom DOS ports.
FastDoom is a particularly impressive effort to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the original hardware Doom was intended for. As technically impressive as Doom was when it came out, there was plenty of headroom left, and it’s fascinating to see how much faster it can be.
Shame FastDoom removed network support, since I could see it being useful at retro LAN parties. That said, it’s an understandable compromise given their goals.
Another one of note is SMMU, which is puzzlingly the “official” version of Doom for Freedos.
I say puzzlingly because as far as I can tell SMMU has not been updated since 2001, and the creator themselves said that it should not be distributed because of all the bugs.
It is commonly combined with FreeDoom which is a project to make a complete set of open source assets – graphics, levels, sounds etc. for Doom. Last I checked FreeDoom was absolutely terrible. To be fair, it’s only on version 0.13, but as far as I’m concerned they could chuck out everything they’ve done and start again.
In the early days of Doom ports, I was still using DOS as my main OS (or the pure DOS mode of Win98).
I’ve played a bit using Doom Legacy, Dosdoom, Zdoom, BOOM and eventually MBF.
Eventually I realized that what I want from my DOS port is limits removed, more mapping features, and higher resolution, so I settled on MBF.
Here is the port source tree as of ~10 years ago:
https://www.doomworld.com/10years/ports/newtree.png
And more history and updated status on the Doomwiki page:
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Timeline_of_source_port_releases
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