Skulltag, it's Doom... but with real networking

During my time at school, before overclocking Celerons and wasting my life on the Internet became the “in” thing, I used to spend quite a lot of time playing Doom. It was, in fact the reason I spent 30 quid on a 10Base2 network card, length of coax cable and learnt all about this stuff called “IPX Networking“.

Me and a friend used to take it in turns to drag our entire PC setup – featuring ‘massive’ 15″ monitors and Cirrus Logic VLB graphics cards – around to the other’s house. Since neither of us could drive, this required a willing parent. And then we’d spend all night playing Doom, followed by Doom 2 when it came out. There was even one night where we clocked the frag counter, just to see what’d happen (it loops back round to zero).

All of that was back in 1994, and over the following years Doom has come out on pretty much everything from your toaster to digital camera. Well, maybe not the toaster, but I bet someone somewhere has tried, probably using an Arduino and Twitter account. I must have bought this damn game more times over the years than anything.

None of these newer versions have been able to quite accurately capture the simple, frightening fun of playing Real Doom on a Real PC in DOS. No chirping chat clients, no fancy graphical updates, no OpenGL, no mouse… just you, the screen and the world’s simplest FPS controls imaginable. And maybe a slightly smaller screen if your PC wasn’t a monster Pentium 166MMX. Modern FPS games are so complicated to play, requiring hand co-ordination that’d make a hardened Robotron player look weak. Doom had 8 buttons you could press, and cleverly they were all clustered around the same part of the keyboard – four arrows, ctrl, alt, shift and space. Old keyboards conveniently had a gap between ctrl and alt for a finger to rest. I once wore this section of keyboard off and made my spacebar lean to the right from excessive Doom playing.

So, anyway, enough of the past… This is the future, and Doom has been made a little bit better. It’s not been totally mashed beyond belief and rendered in ultra-realistic 3D, it’s still the same old blocky Doom, playable with the same old simple key bindings. However, if you get Skulltag and copy your Doom WAD files across, you’re presented with a few extras.

The main extra is the proper networking. Doom network games were always a pain to set up, requiring one person to become the “server” and run their game first, then all the other “client” machines had to try and connect. Should someone’s connection go away, the game stopped. This happened once due to me accidentally pulling my friend’s network card out of his PC while it was switched on. In my defence it was his fault for not screwing the card in with the little retaining screw. Should a game be running already, newcomers weren’t allowed in. It was all done using IPX networking, so when the Internet started to arrive you couldn’t play it online. Fortunately all that’s gone now, and games can be freely joined and exited without changing anything. Also, because it’s Doom, there’s zero lag and it all runs super smooth.

If you’re less than 20 years old, you may not have a clue what the Original Doom was like because you would have been five years old when it came out. It came on five floppy disks, took up a good portion of our meagre 150-210MB hard disks and didn’t run at all in Windows. It was also the most frightening experience you could have in front of a PC. Yeah, the graphics are crap by today’s standards, but really… sitting alone in a dark room creeping around levels, it didn’t take realistically rendered things ripping their way through pipework to make the player try to hide behind their chair. Watch the reaction of a hardened Doom addict when they meet an unexpected rocket coming towards their face

Or in this case doesn’t. The water keeps trying to escape. The boiler man came yesterday, it’s the same bloke who does the gas inspections, and we had a bit of a play with it. Of course, since he was there things worked better than just me being there. We discovered that the boiler pressurises the system up to 4 bar quite happily, which is bad – it should only go to 2 bar. Above 3 the safety relief valve should open and send hot water outside through a little drain pipe. Sure enough, dribbling down the wall outside was some very hot water, and the pressure started to drop.

For the rest of the day it remained at around 2 bar and all seemed… better. Some seals have worn, causing leaks but maybe the expansion vessel isn’t knackered so the boiler shouldn’t need to come off the wall.

However…

This morning I go to the boiler and there’s no pressure again. Yesterday we thought that maybe the pressure gauge was faulty, so I turned the heating on anyway to see what would happen. A fair amount of glugging, slurping and swishing noises confirmed that no, there was not a lot of water left in the radiators. The boiler then switched itself off and instead of flashing the stupid green light of “I’m OK” it lit that constantly and flashed a red light of “something is wrong”.

Well that’s good, my concern about the boiler exploding due to over pressure has gone. And now I know what happens if I try to light the boiler when it has no water in it. So at least I won’t come home one day to find half my kitchen wall missing.

So, best fill the radiators again, back to 1 bar. This took ages, and was accompanied by little whistling noises as the air-release valve opened to vent the air in the system. This valve is supposed to then close again (or get wet and swell shut) to stop the water coming out too. No, it didn’t, did it? Water started to drip, then slowly dribble out the bottom of the boiler and it’s still doing it now. The other leaks have decided to join in too.

Oh, and the pressure went up to 3 bar, but is now dropping back down again. It’s now at 1.5 bar. I will monitor it over the weekend, then ring the plumber back on Monday to let him know what’s going on.

When I buy a house of my own I’m either going to take out boiler insurance, or learn how to fix it myself.

Leaking boiler

What you’re looking at is the underside of my central heating boiler. The crusty white stuff on that pipe is limescale caused by the water in this area. The crusty white stuff shouldn’t be there, it means that pipe has a leak, and is probably partially responsible for my heating system having no water pressure.

I tried filling the radiators back up, but as soon as I started the boiler a fairly fast dripping noise came out the bottom of the boiler. A quick look with my torch showed not one, not two but four leaks on this boiler!

Here’s two of the leaks on the plumbing going to the rest of the house. And in this photo are two more leaks. One is on the pressure relief valve, the other is coming from the back, just above the copper pipe in the background.

Since this is a rented house I’ve just phoned the letting agency who are going to have a plumber call me back. Fortunately the boiler is in my kitchen with all the pipework exposed so I can see and hear this stuff happening. If it was locked away in a cupboard I’d probably never notice.

And no, this isn’t the first time I’ve run the boiler since last winter. I made the point of running it for a few hours each month and it was fine at the weekend when I used it.

Alport Castles

Today me and my dad went for a walk in the Peak District, to a part we’ve never been to before. At the bottom of the Snake Pass is Ladybower Reservoir and the Derwent Valley. On the moorlands at the top is a place called Alport Castles, a large craggy area that looks like a quarry but is actually a natural landslip.

The walking was fairly easy (which is good, it’s been a while since I’ve been out walking) and once onto the moorland quite flat and straight forward. Once at Alport Castles we walked back towards the reservoir and down to the road where, conveniently a bus turned up and saved us a long four mile trek.