playing doom today

there are heaps of options for getting doom running in the 21st century. here are a few, with a linux-centric spin

vanilla. you can always play the original game executables (known as “vanilla doom”) with the help of the dosbox dos emulator. set your cpu “core” and “cycles” to “auto”, frameskip to “1″, graphics to fullscreen opengl, and turn off all the sound except soundblaster

chocolate doom is developed to be the closest to vanilla doom you can get, whilst running natively on modern pcs and operating systems. it’s a direct port of the ‘97-released linux doom sources, and will play almost all demo-recordings the original will. chocolate doom distribute a deb package for easy installation on ubuntu

prboom is the modern culmination of several ports, including the first major widely-accepted port, boom. made with the idea of retaining demo recording compatibility with vanilla and being a modern stable port with features like expanded engine limits and a full complement of editing changes. boom-compatibility became a defacto standard through the 90s. prboom is in debian/ubuntu repos, easily installed with apt-get install prboom

prboom-plus is a further extension of prboom featuring increased performance and many tool-assists for demo recording and playback. follow the instructions for prboom for installing on linux. i almost always play with this port

zdoom emerged in the late 90s and has become the new de-facto standard for maps requiring extended features. it has sloping floors, swimmable water, colored lighting, a full-featured scripting language, and the list goes on. the gzdoom port adds opengl features, including high-res textures and real 3d (room over room). zdoom happily compiles on linux, gzdoom usually works on linux and can also run through wine

legacy was a great sourceport in its’ day. it was one of the first ports to hardware-accelerate the rendering engine, and contains some 3d design and lighting features still not duplicated in other ports. legacy development has slowed since 2003, though the linux binaries still run well and look great in software and opengl. the remood project expands on the doom legacy source code, and distributes a deb package

to get multiplayer going, your best bets are skulltag (based on zdoom 2), zdaemon or odamex (both based on zdoom1)

there are active ports i haven’t covered, like doomsday, eternity, EDGE and vavoom which are all worth a look. the story of older ports like boom, mbf, gldoom, csdoom and many others also make for a good read if you love doom history as much as i do