29
Linux and DOOM (1993)
(lemmy.world)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Someone already talked about the platform agnostic development process and the platform agnostic code that it produced, but no one has talked about what doom itself is and how the limitations of its operations meant that it could reasonably run on a wide variety of hardware.
Doom doesn’t have much of what we expect of games now, the objects are 2d sprites and the level geometry is very simple. The music is midi and the play area is 2d.
Some of what people refer to as bugs in doom are simply artifacts of the design and the good source ports have compatibility levels that can be invoked to match those original bugs and whatnot. By aggressively cutting away anything that wasn’t required, doom became a program that could be ported to anything.