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Dragonsbrethren

Hexen 1.0 downgrade?

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We have downgrade patches for Doom, Doom 2, and Heretic, but I haven't had any luck finding one for Hexen. I'd like to check out Maze and the leftover MAPINFO definitions for myself.

If there's not one out there, would someone with a copy of 1.0 be willing to make one for me?

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Dragonsbrethren said:

We have downgrade patches for Doom, Doom 2, and Heretic, but I haven't had any luck finding one for Hexen. I'd like to check out Maze and the leftover MAPINFO definitions for myself.

If there's not one out there, would someone with a copy of 1.0 be willing to make one for me?


I have 1.0 on CD (I think, let me double check before promising anything), what is it you want exactly? Just the MAPINFO and Maze levels from the wad? I could do that, as long as you're not asking for an exe patch or anything like that.

EDIT: 1.0 confirmed and now installed.

EDIT2: http://www.mediafire.com/?enwu99dlmc6p8wb
Contains old MAPINFO, MAP41, and MAP22 which had a shortcut using the porkolator.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

If there's not one out there, would someone with a copy of 1.0 be willing to make one for me?

Here you go - you'll also need a patching utility, I used bspatch from this site. It's bundled with bsdiff, which is what I used to create the patches. I assume you'll only want to patch hexen.exe and the wad.

They're command line utilities but the syntax is straightforward, for bspatch it's "bspatch oldfile newfile patchfile". By way of example, assuming Hexen's installed to C:\Hexen and you've unzipped the patches and bspatch to C:\Temp, the command line to patch hexen.wad would look something like "bspatch c:\hexen\hexen.wad c:\temp\hexen.wad c:\temp\hexen_wad.pch". That'll create a downgraded wad in C:\Temp.

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Thanks GreyGhost! I'm already familiar with bspatch, but I didn't have that version apparently, so thanks for the link too.

plums, thanks too, but having the original exe and wad is what I was after.

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You're welcome, didn't know you'd encountered bspatch before so decided to err on the side of too much info. I'm sure there's at least a few currently active members who break into a cold sweat when confronted by a command prompt, so it might help them out.

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No worries Dragonsbrethren. bsdiff looks like a useful tool, I'll keep it in mind for the future.

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plums said:

No worries Dragonsbrethren. bsdiff looks like a useful tool, I'll keep it in mind for the future.


I downloaded it, as ive always wanted to see that maze level, so it was useful to someone :D

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One thing I found interesting in the 1.0 version of the wad that I'm not sure if the 1.1 version has, is a large amount of unused sprites which appear to suggest that the Tome of Power may have been originally planned to be in Hexen.

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The only graphic differences in the v1.0 IWAD are the startup screen and several of the life gems. I'm not seeing any noticeable difference on the other colors, but the green used by player 4 was a bright shade in 1.0, versus dull in 1.1. Color translation lumps TRANTBL1-8 changed too, and 11 more were added. I haven't looked at them in depth to see what changed, I'm not even sure what the extra ones are there for.

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Wagi said:

One thing I found interesting in the 1.0 version of the wad that I'm not sure if the 1.1 version has, is a large amount of unused sprites which appear to suggest that the Tome of Power may have been originally planned to be in Hexen.


Not that I doubt the Tome was supposed to be in Hexen at one point, but which sprites do you mean? I remember the Morph Ovum has some sprites, and the golden spinning skull things for the menu, but not much else right from Heretic or otherwise unused.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

The only graphic differences in the v1.0 IWAD are the startup screen and several of the life gems. I'm not seeing any noticeable difference on the other colors, but the green used by player 4 was a bright shade in 1.0, versus dull in 1.1. Color translation lumps TRANTBL1-8 changed too, and 11 more were added. I haven't looked at them in depth to see what changed, I'm not even sure what the extra ones are there for.


8 player support. 1.0 supported up to 4 players and 1.1 up to 8.

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I prepared a DOS-mode downgrade patch for /idgames, which unfortunately is down for now, but here's the zip file anyway: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13513277/doom/hxndwngr.zip

Main thing is that it can preserve exact file timestamps (assuming your system does... DOSBox doesn't support such a thing =p) and can exactly replicate a Hexen 1.0 directory from a clean 1.1 install (it won't delete hexen.cfg or save games or anything but explicitly-defined files... still, save games probably won't work between versions).

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I tried the version of the patch that was put on idgames and it did not work right. The only file that was recognized correctly was hexen.wad.

Yes, I have a real disc:


It says "for Windows 95" on it but I installed the DOS version that's also on the disc.

hexen.exe on the disc is reported to be 923,019 bytes, MD5 checksum:
713319e8adbc34bca8e06dbaff96f86c *D:\HEXEN.EXE
The unpatched game says version 1.1 when started up.

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My hexen.exe has the same md5. It was installed from a 1.0 CD and then upgraded with the 1.1 patch. Did you try GreyGhost's patch?

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Lol downgrade reminds me of how I want commercial release of downgraded star wars the original trilogy without cgi bullshit of 1997 on dvd/bluray

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