Quake is 10

cyclomedia writes "Late on 22nd June 1996 Quake was uploaded to cdrom.com's archives in the form of 7 1.44MB floppy disk images. Though it wasn't until the 23rd that everyone realised (or at least, that's my excuse for being a day late with the news submission). Cue much aggravation on the newsgroups as eager downloaders experienced glorious 2 FPS gameplay."

Anyone Remember...

[HappyCycling]

Anyone remember the shareware cd that had all the id Software games on it? And how it was possible to use a serial # to unlock all those games?

Re:2 FPS?

[fistfullast33l]

Yeah I seem to remember playing quake in Windows 95 with those hardware specs. And someone was complaining about TCP/IP in that mailing list, but I seem to remember playing Quake over the internet on dialup. Fun times. I miss the custom Quakeworld skins myself. And I think there was AirQuake as well that rocked.

Indeed

[PhrostyMcByte]

The single-player was fun, but the real accomplishment of Quake is bringing in the era of deathmatch.

And it's still alive and.. well.. ok, so it's just twitching. I got this game the week it came out (wow, I was 10yo then) and havn't stopped playing since. Connect to oc9.org with your QuakeWorld client [fteqw.com] for some fun :)

It's the arcade-ish physics meant to run on 10 year old cpus that differenciates the game from modern ones, and actually makes the game more fun to play. Your skill in multiplayer depends a lot on mastering the physics that will let you go 10x your normal speed if you let it (there is no spoon!). Be sure to check out QdQwav [gamespy.com] if you havn't already seen it.

Re:Classic quotes

[stratjakt]

There were no GPUs in the mid 90s, the Voodoo/Voodoo 2 didn't have GPUs, they were mere rasterizers. The first GPU was nvidia with the GeForce 256, Aug 31 1999 [nvidia.com]. It took a long while for it to really catch on, since it's just as easy to do the 3d to 2d conversion in memory (CPU).

The 3D engine used by Quake and Quake 2 was pure software, the CPU did all the heavy lifting geometry wise (and still does, for the most part). AFAIK, the 3d geometry part of it is still mainly CPU based, you can't just send every polygon in the world up to the GPU and expect it to sort the shit out in a timely fashion. BSP trees and face culling and all kindsa nifty hacks abound for such things.

We had no fancy hardware T&L business or programmable pixel shaders, and that's how we liked it.

I remember walking uphill 40 miles in the snow just to frag newbies with my nailgun.

blah blah stupid mods blah blah RTFA blah blah

[spun]

This is funny in the context of the article. RTFA before you mod, m'kay?

Re:2 FPS?

[Myself]

And a lot more playable on a 486DX40, also with 8 megs. The difference is that the DX2/66 clocked its bus at 33MHz, whereas the 40 was a real 40MHz bus. I was running a Trident 9400CXi in a VLB slot, and while only rated for a 33MHz bus, it did fine at 40.

Since the video card wasn't doing any of its own processing, moving the CPU-->Video data as fast as possible was the best thing you could do for that game. And you didn't need gobs of RAM either, if your hard drive was also sitting behind a fast VLB controller.

Re:Classic quotes

[PhrostyMcByte]

My first 3d accel card was a Diamond Voodoo Banshee. Top of the line card, for $150. Playing GLQuake with it was incredible.

Re:2 FPS?

[plague3106]

Um, bullshit? 486s did have the option of a FPU. I had a 486DX (which means I had an FPU). Was rid of it by the time Quake came out though, so I can't say if it played ona 486... but if it couldn't it certainly wasn't because of lack of an FPU.

Attention, Mac users

[Stormwatch]

Quake and Quake II updates for Mac OS X --- Fruitz of Dojo. [fruitz-of-dojo.de]

Re:2 FPS?

[Craig Davison]

486DX - has an FPU.
486SX - no FPU. (you could buy an add-on called a 487)

This is not to be confused with the 386 series, which all needed a 387 to do hardware FP.
386DX - no FPU. 32-bit wide external bus.
386SX - no FPU. 16-bit wide external bus.

Re:10 years!

[jsnipy]

yes. TeamFortress started off here as well.

Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law

[BobNET]

There is no random or even pseudorandom level generation.

SLIGE [doomworld.com], SCUDD [newdoom.com], SLUMP [samiam.org].

Okay, so they don't make breathtakingly amazing levels. But they're still better than 90% of the user-made Doom levels out there...

Re:Indeed

[drinkypoo]

Unfortuntally we never got it to connect at 56k, so image doom at half speed.

56k modems don't support sending at 56k (or, actually, 53k as per the FCC.) They can only receive at that speed. I'm not sure if they can send at 33.6k, or if it's only 28.8k, but that's the peak, so they're not going to send THAT fast, either.

Even when you do connect to a proper host device, like a PRI-connected Ascend Max box or something, you don't get to send at 56k. You send at 33.6kbps IIRC, and receive at 53k. Again, these are both maximums. You'll probably never see a perfect connection in your life, statistically. Certainly I haven't.

And today Sonic is 15

[ESqVIP]

In a slightly off-topic note but which might interest many here, Sonic turned 15 today (born on June 23, 1991) according to IGN [ign.com].

Quake Done Quick With a Vengeance

[necro2607]

Or even better, view the entire thing in the actual Quake 1 engine using the recorded demos (.dem)

http://qdq.planetquake.gamespy.com/qdqwav.html [gamespy.com]

Full collection of Quake 1 demo files for the run.

Re:ah the memories

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake actually had the ability to do this; however, there were only two "billboarded" sprites: The bubbles you see when you are drowning in the water, and a spherical lamp in the game.

Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law

[sgtrock]

Name one thing that is in an FPS game that isn't in current quakeworld engines.

Wide open spaces. :)

Re:Old schoolin'

[kirun]

Floppy disks are metric [metric.org.uk]! 90x94mm amd not actually 3.5"

Re:The Size was incredible

[lofidan]

And all by having massive system requirements and being made 10 years later than Quake! Amazing.

== IT'S A DIRECT-X GAME ==

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of code to make this game work is part of DirectX. It's really much bigger than you think, but you don't notice since it is already on your computer.

Pretty useless as coasters or "clay pigeons"

[AHumbleOpinion]

Now all I get is read-only coasters.

They are pretty useless as coaster, zero water absorbancy. The water just beads and rolls off as you pick up the coaster.

They are pretty useless as clay pigeons as well. They launch just fine from the skeet launcher but they move way to fast since they are so much lighter. Worse, they present too low a profile and are a b*tch to hit while in flight.

They are so so as sihlouette targets for plinking with a .22. They prop up and get knocked down just fine, but are too easily disturbed by wind and there is no satisfying "plink". Personally I'm sticking to bright red Coca Cola cans.

I can't really find a damn useful thing to do with AOL CDs.