What is it?
It should be noted that Quake was the first FPS, but not the first
game in general to use 3D-rendered actors: Alone in
the Dark did that already four years earlier. It was also the first
FPS, but not the first game, to use a true 3D engine (as opposed to the
2.5D
engines of the earlier games): Ultima
Underworld and Daggerfall had done that
earlier.
On a VGA card, Quake can run in various modes up to 360×480. This resolution already looks very good (interface graphics, of course, look rather strange, since they are always displayed pixel-exact) and is probably the best choice on a Pentium. Additionally, the game should recognize a VESA 2.0 compliant card and give you a choice of all the supported 256 color modes up to 1280×1024. At the time, no other game supported such a resolution, not even in 2D!
WinQuake supports three windowed modes, 320×240, 640×480 and 800×600. The latter two are just pixel-doubled. In fullscreen it can run between 320×200 and, again, 1280×1024. Settings are not saved automatically saved between sessions, unless you explicitely set the new resolution as default. The software renderer still runs well on modern hardware (and XP; after all, WinQuake was designed to run on NT to begin with), but of course it looks rather dated, even in the highest resolution. Nevertheless some prefer it, especially since models move more naturally in software rendering.
Quake was among the first 3D games to support some form of 3D acceleration, and the first it supported was Rendition Vérité, which in turn was one of the first acceleration techniques (released about the same time as the 3Dfx Voodoo, after the ill-fated S3 ViRGE), and the only one I know with a DOS API, Speedy3D. Other DOS games to support it were Tomb Raider (for which patches supporting all the accelerators of the time were issued), Descent II, Mechwarrior 2, Fatal Racing, and Flight Unlimited.
Rendition Vérité was a good chip, not only for its own proprietary API, but also for Direct3D, where it produced results very similar to Glide on a Voodoo chip. While it offered good VESA SVGA support in 2D, unfortunately its VGA performance was very bad. With a Rendition Vérité chip, Doom would crawl even on a Pentium 166.
In its time, Rendition Vérité was something of a budget solution. While there were high-end cards incorporating as many as four Voodoo chips (the legendary Quantum3D Obsidian 100SB 4440), Rendition Vérité cards were moderate in price and performance. Here are a few with the second version of the chip:
DOS-based VQuake was rendered obsolete by GLQuake, which ran in Windows only and will run on any modern computer (all major cards since about 2000 have OpenGL support), and both were rendered obsolete by enhanced third-party engines like FuhQuake since the full source code was released. But back then, many preferred VQuake over GLQuake, because it looked better and ran smoother, so you may want to give it a try.
It is interesting and symptomatic for the character of the game that the makers of Quake decided not to support 3Dfx's proprietary subsystem Glide, but full OpenGL. Except for the obscure Pinball Wizard 2000 by German developer Ikarion, the Quake series and the games based on their engines would remain the only ones to do so for quite a while. Descent³ and Odium, both 1999, were among the first OpenGL games not based on Quake engines.
There lies, of course, a certain irony in the fact that nevertheless the Voodoo cards were the only affordable hardware to support this. 3Dfx wrote a MiniGL driver that supported exactly that subset of OpenGL that Quake used. It proved to be the killer app for their chips.
Theoretically, GLQuake will run on any compliant OpenGL that supports the texture objects extensions, but unless it is very powerfull hardware that accelerates everything needed, the game play will not be acceptable. If it has to go through any software emulation paths, the performance will likely be well under one frame per second.
At this time (March '97), the only standard OpenGL hardware that can play GLQuake reasonably is an Intergraph RealiZm, which is a VERY expensive card. 3Dlabs has been improving their performance significantly, but with the available drivers it still isn't good enough to play. Some of the current 3Dlabs drivers for Glint and Permedia boards can also crash NT when exiting from a full screen run, so I don't recommend running GLQuake on 3Dlabs hardware.
3Dfx has provided an opengl32.dll that implements everything GLQuake needs, but it is not a full OpenGL implementation. Other OpenGL applications are very unlikely to work with it, so consider it basically a "GLQuake driver". See the included 3dfx.txt for specific installation notes. 3Dfx can only run full screen, but you must still have your desktop set to a 16 bit color mode for GLQuake to start.
To my astonishment, I found that at first GLQuake would not run on my current machine. First it gave me an error that the GLIDE2X.DLL was not found. When I downloaded and installed that, it started, but immediately threw some more errors and aborted. The reason is the OPENGL32.DLL that the installation procedure puts into your Quake folder whether you need it or not, and you only need it, of course, if you have a 3Dfx card. As soon as I removed the offending DLL, GLQuake ran without problems.
Well, nearly. What I couldn't do was change the screen resolution. Since all the contemporary OpenGL drivers messed up, John Carmack disabled changing resolutions at runtime. It can only be done at startup, with the help of command line options. And whenever I tried that, GLQuake would crash. But even at the default resolution of 640×400 it looks better than software rendering at 1280×1024.
Music (written Trent Reznor of the Nine Inch Nails, whose logo was featured on the nailgun ammo boxes) is played from the CD only. The only thing the DOS version of Quake needs, and supports, is a Soundblaster-compatible card with the environmental variable properly set. A later patch added support for the Gravis UltraSound MAX and PnP, but not for the classic GUS (and ACE).
Here, too, Quake heralds a new age where video hardware (which had previously been fairly irrelevant, apart from clearly defined standards) is more important than audio hardware (which had previously been the decisive element in a games machine).
The history of the Linux version is a bit obscure. In 1996, the source code for Quake was leaked. Someone used it to port the game to Linux, and sent the patches to John Carmack. John Carmack, who has always been an open source advocate, used these to create an official Linux version. So in one way or another, Quake has been available for Linux right frrom the beginning. The release of the full source code under the GPL in 1999 gave rise to new ports and replacement engines.
A Macintosh version of the original Quake was released in September 1997. It ran on a Power Macintosh with 16 megabytes of RAM or more. It's hard to come by nowadays, id does not sell it any more. Unlike the Windows version, it supported Glide, and only Glide, but since the GPL release of the full source code, third-party OpenGL ports have been made.
Quake was ported to the Amiga in 1998. The conversion was done by clickBOOM, who had made their appearance in 1996 with Capital Punishment. The development team was however not the same, and nothing is known about their identities.
The conversion was done very well, adding a few platform-specific features. However, even on a 060 with a GFX card the best you can hope for is 320×200 fullscreen.
When Quake was released on the PC back in 1996 it caused maybe the biggest ever stir in the games industry, people flocked to the PC to be able to play it, with its unrivalled multiplayer support and its massive expandability it turned out to be one of the most popular games ever. Now, thanks to clickBOOM Amiga users have got the chance to play it on there beloved Amiga computers, PC owners always said it could never be done, well, they have now been proved wrong.
Somewhat disappointingly, Quake doesn't deviate from the Doom plot as much as you'd be imagine. This really is all about blood and guts and fighting your way to the exit. Sure, there are puzzles, of sorts, but these are not exactly difficult because most simply involve pressing a button or a switch here and then trying to find which door/drawbridge/trap has been either opened, lowered or rendered harmless. Clues are even included to help you along—The switch for this door is located nearbyis simple enough for even me to comprehend. And you can't exactly miss the coloured keys when you find 'em or know which doors they relate to.
On 2006-09-15, a Falcon port was released by Miro Kropacek (MiKro). It can be downloaded from Atari.sk. Here are some of the features:
- 320×200, 256 colours
- VGA or RGB
- 24 kHz 16bit stereo sound
- Full mouse support
- 060 optimized rendering routines
- TOS/MagiC/FreeMiNT friendly
- Runs in 99% time in user space so you can use memory protection, background audio (yeah, you can run aniplayer and then Quake…) etc.
- Support for some Eiffel keys—'~', PageUp, PageDown, Home, End, MouseWheelDown, Pause
It is reported to run best on FreeMiNT. Network play is disabled. While Quake is not the first FPS for the Falcon (that was Running in 1997), it is, as far as I know, the first open source port.
FuhQuake is a QuakeWorld client that aims to not only to have a plethora of gameplay and console improvements, but to also incorporate stunning visual effects and eyecandy.
FuhQuake was developed by A Nourai, based on Anton Gavrilov's ZQuake. Late in August 2006 (just when I started updating this page) fuhquake.net went down. The domain is still resolved, but the server seems to be empty. Luckily at least one mirror is still working, but it contains only the files, not the website.
