Glad to see some love for Wolf3d. It was an important step in the development of the FPS genre, but has always been overshadowed by Doom. As someone who could not play Doom on my 386, Wolfenstein I have many fond memories of this classic. I'm sure I'm not alone!
It probably depends on how young one was, I was young enough to play it for a year or two before Doom appeared (also Doom was kind-of sluggish on my machine at the time).
Fond memories. I remember going to the local YMCA (sub-2000) and going from DOS terminal to DOS terminal typing in (IIRC) `exec wolf3d.exe` and finding one of the few PC's that had it loaded to play it.
I had a similar experience with Quake when it first came out... it felt more like a slideshow on my AMD 5x86 @133mhz w/ 64mb ram and large cache module. My computer was entirely lopsided for games, I got the AMD a few months before a crazy deal on the ram and cache module for it, so I maxed it out. I will say it tore through business apps with OS/2 and later NT4 ran like a champ on that little box.
I couldn't afford the jump to Pentium at the time. I had it for about 4 years or so, until I bumped up to an overclocked Duron at 1ghz around 2000-2001 or so.
Thanks, I read your article and my main reaction is that I'm saddened by the loss of data on those few unreadable discs. I hope it wasn't something you'll need to dig up in a few years.
Perhaps not compression as we see it today. But one could argue that tile based graphics and code based music is a form of compression. Old games used a myriad of cool tricks to get around their limitations.
Modern coders will probably never experience the fun of rewriting the same thing endlessly only to discover how good some early version really was. Then some time after giving up someone else would make a similar thing go 20 times faster.
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