Best doom wad from before doom's source was released?

I recall reading a piece by Lee Killough (I think it was at myk's site) where he described his efforts to solve the VPO issue. It sounded very far from simple.

Also, reverse engineeing Doom(2).exe and releasing a modified version of it would presumably be rather illegal.

Graf Zahl said:

No. These are statically allocated buffers which cannot be resized by binary patches. For that you have to recompile the source.

so decompile the EXE, modifying code, recompile would not work ?

VinceDSS said:

so decompile the EXE, modifying code, recompile would not work ?

You can't decompile such complex code. There are no tools which can do it so you'd have to do all of it manually - without any reference how the data is organized internally.
So by comparing the result with the released source you will find that most of it is almost identical and the rest is the really critical stuff: third-party libraries, code that directly accesses the hardware and other messy stuff. Especially the sound code is so complex that even a very skilled programmer would spend an unreasonable amount of time to get anything out.

No, the only way to lift those limit is to take the released source and go from there.

VinceDSS said:
Before the source release some people made aimbots for DM cheating.
And Uwe Girlich produced some TAS-like demos (with slo mo and connections).

The aimbots messed with device input, and the slow motion was achieved by slowing down DOS.

Grazza said:
Also, reverse engineeing Doom(2).exe and releasing a modified version of it would presumably be rather illegal.

Well, yeah... DeHackEd and its editing potential was considered somewhat questionable early on.

I guess it probably got away with it just because it was distributed as small patches and not the whole EXE.

chilvence said:

I guess it probably got away with it just because it was distributed as small patches and not the whole EXE.

I think it got away with it because nobody really cared ad id. Dehacked didn't do them any damage but it showed how strongly some people were interested in the game. Any action would probably only have hurt their own business.

John Carmack said:

Dhacked was a bit of a surprise to me, and I always looked at it as something that maybe shouldn't have been done. I'm not very fond of binary editing an executable. It clearly showed that people were interested in more control, so it probably argued for the greater freedom given with quake.

myk said:

The aimbots messed with device input, and the slow motion was achieved by slowing down DOS.

not only slo mo, it is know that Girlich used a kind of demo connection (like TAS) long before the sources were released.

and it is impossible to do that with regular doom2.exe

VinceDSS said:

Would it be possible to do that to remove the savegame buffer limit, the VPO, the HOM and the maxdemo limit ?

I've experimentally found that with Ultimate Doom exe, the maximum maxdemo value I could use was 3055, which allows a bit over 6 hours of recording in single mode. While that's more than enough, I wonder if it's the exe that fails to allocate more memory, or something else. For example, RamIdle showed there were 12 free megabytes of RAM, so technically I should be able to use a value close to 12000?

Hmm, I guess this post would fit better in Demos or General.

Anyway, my pre-source favorite was Memento Mori, the first one.

Graf Zahl said:

I think it got away with it because nobody really cared ad id. Dehacked didn't do them any damage but it showed how strongly some people were interested in the game. Any action would probably only have hurt their own business.

It's probably exactly that. A pitty, most other companies don't realize that.

doom2.exe has a maximum maxdemo of 4110 = a bit over 8 hours.
in coop it's : 4h for 2 players, and 2h only for 4 players.

could some 30hr or 30av maxes be tight with 8h maxdemo ? :)

and using wads recudes the maxdemo a lot too, it seems AV need a maxdemo around 3200 and will just crash with higher values.

farthest I got with Hr-max was dying on 16/31 a few times.
I've forgotten maps like 14 and 15 since and would have to re-learn. :(
one of these was just over 4 hrs, which is longer than the longest released Doom demo.
I think I budgeted reaching hr21 at the 5hr mark and then the long maps start. :D
got to get Radek or Machata interested in episode2... then a movie. :)