Revisiting DOS Wolfenstein 3D
In researching episode 13 of the Atari Jaguar Game by Game Podcast, I needed to revisit the original Wolfenstein 3D for DOS. While there are a number of ways to play Wolf3D on a modern computer, but I'm trying to be as authentic and retro as possible, and Wolfenstein 3D doesn't get any more retro than a 5 1/4" floppy disk.
I'll be talking more about this in the episode, but that's the original floppy disk I bought from a shareware vendor, my first taste of first-person shooters.
I don't still have the 386 computer I used back then, that would have taken up far more space than a floppy disk (also, it broke irreparably some years ago), but I do have a Pentium-based computer I built in 1996, two full generations later. It's got a 5 1/4" floppy drive, and I was able to install the shareware Wolf3D off of my old shareware disk. I keep this computer around for an authentic MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 or 95 or NT4 or BeOS experience, it has all those operating systems installed, and it has been with me so long that it has been upgraded pretty much as far as it can go.
When I ran Wolf3D on my old 386, I would look at the Available Memory display during the game's title screen sequence, and wish that some day, perhaps, I might be able to max out all those gauges. It was my Holy Grail. With 224MB of RAM and properly-configured autoexec.bat and config.sys files, this Pentium pegs all three gauges easily. I don't think I'm as excited now as I would have been back in 1992.
This is just a brief glimpse into how I went about capturing audio and data for episode 13 of the Atari Jaguar Game by Game Podcast, check out the actual episode (well, probably after I finish it) for more stories and information.
Edited by Shinto
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