Well, I rebuilt the nostalgic 1997, P233 MMX/Riva 128 machine I (eventually) had as a child again. To christen it I finished off the final episode of Ultimate Doom I hadn't previously felt obligated to beat in order to say I "finished" Doom.
I mean, at the end of chapter 3 it says "The End". Who cares about chapter 4?
Anyways, it felt kind of perfunctory. I think the only slightly inspired level is one that it turned out Romero made when I looked it up.
I started playing Shogo on the same computer. It has some chop at the lowest settings, especially when too many enemies get on screen at a time. I keep thinking 1997 was a horrible time to buy a computer expecting to play 3d games. Checking old ads in CGW, $2500 got you a P233 MMX, a 1st gen 4MB 3d accelerator and 32 MB of RAM. Although I guess you got all the trimmings too. CRT monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, sometimes a joystick. Still, 3d games coming out in the first half of 1998 really need a Pentium II and a Voodoo 2 to run remotely smooth.
It's just a super hard transition with the enormous leap in performance from the Voodoo generation of cards to the Voodoo 2 generation of cards, as well as the enormous leap in gaming performance from Pentium to Pentium II. So of course now I'm resisting the urge to build a Pentium II machine. Maybe I'll try to beat Shogo before I go any further down that rabbit hole.
Win95/DOS 7.1 - P233 MMX (@2.5 x 100 FSB), Diamond Viper V330 AGP, SB16 CT2800
Win98 - K6-2+ 500, GF2 MX, SB AWE 64 CT4500, SBLive CT4780
Win98 - Pentium III 1000, GF2 GTS, SBLive CT4760
WinXP - Athlon 64 3200+, GF 7800 GS, Audigy 2 ZS