User:Chungy/How to download and run Doom

The central experience of the Doom community is playing the game. If you have never played before, this guide will help you get started.

You will need a computer, game console, or mobile capable of running Doom (a fairly complete list can be found here). Doom can run on a very wide variety, but this article is intended to cover the basics and assumes common hardware and operating systems of the present.

Most of the Doom games are not available for free, with the exception of the demo versions of Doom 1 and Doom 3. As an alternative, Freedoom provides wholly-free games with the full support to play mods on top of it. This article will focus on the Doom games only.

For computers: Steam
Steam is presently the only digital distribution that sells Doom. The games are cheap, and are frequently placed on sale. The store items to look out for are:
 * The Ultimate Doom
 * Doom II
 * Final Doom
 * Doom Classic Complete; all the above games
 * Doom 3: BFG Edition; includes The Ultimate Doom and Doom II as well.

If you are a newcomer and wishes to spend money for only one of the games, Doom II provides the widest support for community mods and online play. Doom 3: BFG Edition serves as a good introduction for the entire franchise.

All of these games are sold only for the Windows platform. On Mac and Linux computers, you will need to use the Windows version of Steam via Wine to download them. Native versions of all the games can be played afterwards.

For computers: demo versions
For the original Doom, the demo version is mirrored in an archive:
 * doom1.wad archived

On Windows, you may need to install a program such as 7-Zip to extract it. Mac and Linux should be able to handle it normally.

For Doom 3, the demo is available for Windows and Linux. You should be able to still use the installer and play it normally on current systems:
 * Windows
 * Linux

Windows
Steam comes pre-configured with Doom in DOSBox. It works for the original experience, although it can be a bit poor for controls and for performance. As an alternative, you can take the following steps for a native version:


 * 1) Download chocolate-doom--win32.zip and extract it to somewhere such as your Desktop or Documents folders.
 * 2) Run chocolate-doom-setup and configure the game to your preferences. See Setup on the Chocolate Doom wiki for complete documentation.
 * 3) Click Save parameters and launch DOOM to start playing; or use Warp to select specific games in case you have multiple.

Linux

 * 1) Check your packaging software for the chocolate-doom. It is available on all major Linux distributions.
 * 2) Copy a game WAD file to either your home directory, or /usr/share/games/doom; the latter will probably need to be created with root privileges on the system. These files should be stored with all-lowercase names; doom2.wad, not DOOM2.WAD, for example.
 * 3) Run chocolate-setup from the Terminal, or look for Chocolate Setup in your desktop menu. Configure the game to your preferences; see Setup on the Chocolate Doom wiki for complete documentation.
 * 4) Click Save parameters and launch DOOM to start playing; or use Warp to select specific games in case you have multiple.

Mac

 * 1) Download chocolate-doom-.dmg and ??? and then profit.

-- ok, I know nothing about Mac.

Windows
Once you have Doom 3: BFG Edition installed via Steam, you already have the optimum method to play the game. Just launch it through Steam or a desktop shortcut and you're good to go.

Linux
-- stuff about rbdoom-3-bfg. I'm not aware of precompiled binaries readily available. Maybe recommend the original Doom 3 instead?

Mac
-- likewise for Mac.

Advanced topics
This article purposefully oversimplifies the process of obtaining and running Doom. Given its history of over a couple decades' of releases, explaining all of them would result in a very lengthy list.

Also given its long history of source ports, Chocolate Doom is by far not the only way to play, and is not even preferential to many people. It is, however, simple.