When it comes to playing Doom on unusual platforms or unsupported ones, we've got our hands full. The enthusiast community never stops, and one of the most impressive developments is FastDoom, originally designed for 386 and 486 computers. The good news is that its creator also decided to add special video modes, enabling it to run on slower ISA cards. For example, have you ever thought about playing Doom with a Hercules display? Now you can.
Believe it or not, there was a time when running Doom was difficult. Many players struggled with their 486s, fighting to reach a minimum of 30 FPS. Pentium processors became a brute-force solution for both Doom and the new Quake with its real-time 3D rendering, but more than 25 years have passed since then, and the fan community is doing things that were once impossible.
If you want to play classic Doom on a modern machine, our guide has everything you need to know and more, but if the plan is to return to hell with retro hardware, you should give FastDoom a chance. Created by ViTi95 on GitHub as a fork of PCDoom, FastDoom aims to offer a DOS port of Doom as fast as possible, to the point where you can get an acceptable experience on 486 systems, and even 386. However, FastDoom also has special video modes, and it lets us do things like this: Playing Doom with a Hercules display.
Playing Doom with Hercules graphics and two monitors
Once again: This was impossible in 1993. The minimum requirements for Doom clearly indicated 4 megabytes of RAM and a VGA graphics card. FastDoom has received several updates recently (half a dozen so far this year), and with each new build, ViTi95 finds a way to extract a little more performance from hardware that in the past only promised suffering. As if that were not enough, FastDoom now supports two monitors, activating the map in Hercules mode and the game in classic VGA.
What's next for FastDoom? Honestly, the sky is the limit. Among the special video modes, modifications to improve its framerate, extended audio support (think Disney Sound Source, Covox, and the speaker) and a long list of optimizations, this is the best time to play Doom on retro hardware. Download a copy!
Official site and download: Click here
