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Blzut3

RISC OS Port Doom/Heretic/Hexen

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I'm not sure how well known this is, but while noting to myself that Heretic has not had any official ports (although Raven's site once said it was available for the Mac, I have not seen any indication this port actually exists) I noticed that Towers of Darkness was indeed ported to RISC OS. A full review of the port is seen here. The interesting part isn't so much that it exists as the only commercial port of Heretic, but that sports an optional 24-bit renderer at 640x400. In addition it seems to have an experimental bilinear filtering mode for scaling the sprites.

I know awhile back the RISC OS version of Doom 2 was shown here. Turns out that odd depth fog was due to the 24-bit rendering feature and not the camera. Some more details here.

All ports are done by R-Comp Interactive.

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Blzut3 said:

I'm not sure how well known this is, but while noting to myself that Heretic has not had any official ports (although Raven's site once said it was available for the Mac, I have not seen any indication this port actually exists)

Heretic and Hexen were both available for Mac, at least in shareware/demo form if nothing else -- I can't vouch for the full versions, but I had demo versions of both games as a kid.

If these RISC OS ports came out in 2000 (going by the date of the review), I'm surprised to see an official port created so long after the games' original releases, for an OS that existed when the games first came out.

The picture-in-picture automap feature mentioned in the RISC "Doom+" port sounds pretty interesting. The texture filtering and 24-bit lighting in some of those Heretic/Hexen shots, though, haven't aged very well.

edit: Bumped to reply because of a link in this thread

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esselfortium said:

Heretic and Hexen were both available for Mac, at least in shareware/demo form if nothing else -- I can't vouch for the full versions, but I had demo versions of both games as a kid.

I know Hexen and Deathkings were available for Mac. You can find them on ebay every now and then. I've never seen Heretic though. I haven't even seen a link for an official demo, just fan ports that include the shareware iwad. One such port even mentions: "Unfortunately, the original Heretic was never made for the Mac."

Edit: Also the release date of around 2000 seems likely since from what I've seen the Doom port was done in 1998.

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Huh, that's odd. I'm positive that I had the Heretic shareware on my Mac at some point when I was a kid, since that's the only time I've ever played through it :P Maybe it was an unofficial port.

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esselfortium said:

The picture-in-picture automap feature mentioned in the RISC "Doom+" port sounds pretty interesting. The texture filtering and 24-bit lighting in some of those Heretic/Hexen shots, though, haven't aged very well.


I wonder how those effects compare to e.g. the 24-bit color modes of Mocha Doom and _bruce_'s modified Chocolate Doom (still no official name for it?). I think the "texture filtering" we see is actually framebuffer post-processing and not actual texture filtering, but without a peek at the source code, I can't be certain.

Edit: NM, the FAQ mentioned "bi-linear texture filtering", but that can't be easily applied to individual textures without rewriting the entire engine to act more like a simulated OpenGL graphics engine (in order to get rid of indexed/paletted graphics) rather than e.g. simply increasing the resolution and decreasing the scale of original textures accordingly in-game. Sounds like too much trouble to simulate hardware rendering in software.

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