Socket 7 is the way to go for DOOM - lots of cheap PCI VGA cards available and any decent Sound Blaster Pro compatible sound card will do. Wavetable recommended but the DOOMs run A-OK under Windows 9X so there are plenty of software wavetable options that will sound OK.

I agree, a Pentium is my preferred Doom weapon. A Sound Canvas is a must for me as well 😊

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I agree, a Pentium is my preferred Doom weapon. A Sound Canvas is a must for me as well 😊

Why is a must? Probably I'm not audio expert but does it sound much different?

For me, the original DOOM was the reason I upgraded from a 386SX-16 (my 'Wolf3d' machine) to a 486DX2-66 VLB.
Pentiums weren't a 'thing' yet for consumers. 486 just became affordable.
I got a Diamond Speedstar PRO VLB card, powered by a CL5426 chip. One of the finest VLB cards you could have for DOOM at the time.
The game played really well.
I later swapped my CPU for an Intel OverDrive model with heatsink, and installed a fan, and ran it as a DX2-80, which it still is today. That gives it just that extra bit of oomph for DOOM for the more complex areas where the framerates will drop off.

For sound, my setup was a SB Pro 2.0 for sound effects, and a 1 MB Gravis UltraSound running MegaEm for Sound Canvas music.

For me, it's like this:
Wolfenstein 3D: fast 286/386SX/386DX
DOOM: 486DX2 VLB
Quake: Pentium

386SX wrote:

Why is a must? Probably I'm not audio expert but does it sound much different?

Just look up some videos on YouTube. The Roland Sound Canvas is basically a 'prosumer' quality synthesizer device, was expensive at the time, but it did deliver.
OPL2/OPL3 music on your average Sound Blaster clone... doesn't sound that great.
On the other hand, I didn't have an UltraSound in the early days of DOOM, so I was mostly familiar with how its music sounded on a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0. You could argue that it's the way most people played it, and that's how it's 'supposed to sound', even though it's not the best-sounding configuration for DOOM.

Scali wrote:

For me, the original DOOM was the reason I upgraded from a 386SX-16 (my 'Wolf3d' machine) to a 486DX2-66 VLB. Pentiums weren't a […]
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For me, the original DOOM was the reason I upgraded from a 386SX-16 (my 'Wolf3d' machine) to a 486DX2-66 VLB.
Pentiums weren't a 'thing' yet for consumers. 486 just became affordable.
I got a Diamond Speedstar PRO VLB card, powered by a CL5426 chip. One of the finest VLB cards you could have for DOOM at the time.
The game played really well.
I later swapped my CPU for an Intel OverDrive model with heatsink, and installed a fan, and ran it as a DX2-80, which it still is today. That gives it just that extra bit of oomph for DOOM for the more complex areas where the framerates will drop off.

For sound, my setup was a SB Pro 2.0 for sound effects, and a 1 MB Gravis UltraSound running MegaEm for Sound Canvas music.

For me, it's like this:
Wolfenstein 3D: fast 286/386SX/386DX
DOOM: 486DX2 VLB
Quake: Pentium

Thank you all for the answers.
Nice, that Overdrive cpu is the same I've installed in this Doom config, the usual passive heatsink Overdrive DX2 66Mhz,too bad I can't get to use the Overdrive DX4 100Mhz cause as I said make the system crash during games I think for a bios related problem cause it recognize it as a DX4 120Mhz (?).

In my past I couldn't play Doom when it was new, cause my 386SX-20 (soldered plastic type) with the Oak ISA video card wasn't almost enough for Wolf3D... I remember playing it at lower size window to be enough smooth, more a video card problem that a cpu one. At that time I preferred the PC speaker sound to any Soundblaster one. 😁 And when I got the 386 it was already an old computer, there were already 486 pc around and first Pentium cpus were already released.

Time correct "Best" early Pentium with Roland SC55
Not quite best but still time correct, DX2 66 or above, Yamaha DB50XG for music or AWE for more of budget option.

Really the hard decision comes down to the music hardware!

Yep agree that a 486 is more period correct - that's what started my DOOM obsession on - but it only really starts to fly on a 100Mhz + 486, which is just a wanna be Pentium anyway, so you might as well get the real thing !

badmojo wrote:

Socket 7 is the way to go for DOOM - lots of cheap PCI VGA cards available and any decent Sound Blaster Pro compatible sound card will do. Wavetable recommended but the DOOMs run A-OK under Windows 9X so there are plenty of software wavetable options that will sound OK.

Well, sounds like a gauntlet to me. I guess I'm testing Doom in DOS mode on my DFI KT133 card. Now, where's that spare Yamaha ISA card?

What config did you have the first time you played Doom? And do you remember the day it was released?

Too bad I lost that moment, I was still learning the 386SX with its Dos games and the few games I had was already amazing for me, being used to the older consoles.

By the way I am playing the original Ultimate Doom version and I don't know but I didn't remember all these great textures and animations, it looks like much much more advanced that I remembered. The Jaguar based version of the GBA I finished many times, can't even compare in terms of geometry and textures.

486SX 33, 4MB RAM, PC speaker. I was in high school, late '93 I'd say. A friend of my older sister showed up one day and plonked himself in front of my PC as he often did, usually to my disgust. But that day he had a stack of disks and started to install something - I'd never heard of it. One of the disks was corrupt, as floppies often were, so he rushed off in his crappy silver Celica to get another copy, which suggested that something significant was afoot. Once he'd returned and installed the shareware version of DOOM successfully, he fired it up and I watched in amazement as the menu screen dropped away and the love of my young nerdy life was revealed to me.

badmojo wrote:

486SX 33, 4MB RAM, PC speaker. I was in high school, late '93 I'd say. A friend of my older sister showed up one day and plonked himself in front of my PC as he often did, usually to my disgust. But that day he had a stack of disks and started to install something - I'd never heard of it. One of the disks was corrupt, as floppies often were, so he rushed off in his crappy silver Celica to get another copy, which suggested that something significant was afoot. Once he'd returned and installed the shareware version of DOOM successfully, he fired it up and I watched in amazement as the menu screen dropped away and the love of my young nerdy life was revealed to me.

😁 😉

DX2 66, 8MB RAM, VLB ATI Mach64, SB16....
This PC! Osbone 486 DX2 66 VL-Bus (My 1st PC ever)

I got the shareware version off my mate who had it pre installed on his DX4 100 that he got few months after we got our PC so would have been 1995 some time?
I don't remember playing/seeing it for the first time, but I remember the first time finishing the shareware version, was just before going to school one day, I told my mate and he said impressed, "how did you do that!"

First time we ever played the full version was whenever I got Ultimate Doom, 96? 97? Up till then Shareware Doom or full copy of Doom2 served us well

chinny22 wrote:

DX2 66, 8MB RAM, VLB ATI Mach64, SB16.... This PC! Osbone 486 DX2 66 VL-Bus (My 1st PC ever) […]
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DX2 66, 8MB RAM, VLB ATI Mach64, SB16....
This PC! Osbone 486 DX2 66 VL-Bus (My 1st PC ever)

I got the shareware version off my mate who had it pre installed on his DX4 100 that he got few months after we got our PC so would have been 1995 some time?
I don't remember playing/seeing it for the first time, but I remember the first time finishing the shareware version, was just before going to school one day, I told my mate and he said impressed, "how did you do that!"

First time we ever played the full version was whenever I got Ultimate Doom, 96? 97? Up till then Shareware Doom or full copy of Doom2 served us well

Nice computer. My 386SX had a similar case even if without any brands I can remember. Regarding Doom, I've probably seen Doom 2 before the first version. As I said I still had the 386SX playing Wolf3D but one time I remember playing Doom 2 first episode on a friend's 486SX2 50Mhz around early '97.

Believe or not i played Doom on a 386sx-20 with only 3 mb of ram using windows 3.1 virtual memory. It was slow but mostly "playable" with low detail and almost minimum screen size. But i played it first on a friend's 486dx-33.

dondiego wrote:

Believe or not i played Doom on a 386sx-20 with only 3 mb of ram using windows 3.1 virtual memory. It was slow but mostly "playable" with low detail and almost minimum screen size. But i played it first on a friend's 486dx-33.

Impressive. I had problems running Wolf3D on that cpu mostly cause the vga I had. And I tried with an high end 386DX-40 with the GD5429 ISA and fastest 60ns ram I found, and still it was playable at low details but with two windows size steps less.

For me the Doom PC is a DX4-100 with an SB16 because that's how I experienced it.. But the optimal way to play would probably be a Pentium 100+ and an AWE64 Gold.

appiah4 wrote:

For me the Doom PC is a DX4-100 with an SB16 because that's how I experienced it.. But the optimal way to play would probably be a Pentium 100+ and an AWE64 Gold.

I'm playing it on the quiet high end DX2-66, GD5429 VLB, 16MB 50ns and 256Kbyte L2 but in some episodes frame rate begin to be quiet low. Impressive how the real original PC version compared to the various console ports was already that complex.

I agree a 486/66 is the most period-correct, and probably what it was optimised on. Of course people played it on CPUs slower than that but you wouldn't want to if you had a choice. Doom doesn't use the FPU so a 486SX is just the same as a DX, but a 386 is about 2x slower (more without cache - seems most consumer 386s had no cache).

More importantly - exactly 8M RAM if run in DOS. Doom's static memory allocation expected 8MB - any more would be unused, any less caused continual swapping to disk.