Comprehensive Doom95 guide for newer Windows

Thanks for the info. I really don't understand why this isn't high priority for CMake as it's some very essential piece of setup that's probably needed by lots and lots of projects.

I knew the option exists but I never managed to piece together the full command line from the little info I found.

How funny..I was waiting for a massive defrag/malware/etc scan on my machine in Safe Mode and found a Doom95 executable. Heh, it ran really well and rendered partial-invisibility correctly. Probably because it was using the standard VGA drivers instead of video card extensions.

Chu said:

How funny..I was waiting for a massive defrag/malware/etc scan on my machine in Safe Mode and found a Doom95 executable. Heh, it ran really well and rendered partial-invisibility correctly. Probably because it was using the standard VGA drivers instead of video card extensions.

Are you on Windows XP?

Edward850 said:

As the HUD in Doom does not work like that,

There is no HUD in DOOM.

Edward850 said:

fat chance.

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1316822#post1316822

Edward850 said:

I have insider knowledge that modern GZDoom does in fact run on XP anyway.

I have insider knowledge that you're talking out of your ass.

Graf Zahl said:

The last official builds habe been accidentally compiled with XP support off.

Good to know it was accidental, Graf.

Never_Again said:

There is no HUD in DOOM.

You don't consider the statusbar + messages as a HUD?
http://doomwiki.org/wiki/HUD

VGA said:

That's my point. It doesn't "run like shit".

Have you tried running it in Windows 9x/ME? Even with a Geforce FX card, it'll chop down to 5-10 FPS at times (especially on a cluster of spectres). When walking against a wall it slows down too. This happens with 640x400 and especially 640x480. Not only that, the spectre's can be rendered wrong (if you experience this it gets even slower). Only solution for me was disabling directdraw acceleration (especially with a Rage128).

Like you said, use the -emulate switch to turn off ddraw acceleration. I guess it would only work fine on ancient drivers/gfx cards ...

You have a great write-up on your first post! I didn't read it first-hand so sorry about that (I honestly thought you were talking why people don't like it?).

I personally find the Doom 95 launcher one of the best things about Doom 95, and that is why I still use it (I have 98 installed on my Piledriver system). I can pick whichever level and difficulty I want, all with a classic native Window interface. It's very professional and cleanly laid out. It basically works like a manager for everything Doom is capable of (demos, save games, hardware settings, level selection, difficulty, pwads, cheats, etc.). I do think Doom 95 is great. I think the only thing wrong is the midi music being broken with TNT (Human BBQ).

EDIT:
Yeah I agree with you about Doom 95 being great, even if it is 2014! I don't know any source port that manages wads, save-games, demos, settings, etc. It is even better that it is a native Windows interface with minimal resource use. Thanks much for the write-up! Your spoilers are the best!

You could try Virtualmidisynth, although it mentions XP/Vista/7, not 98/ME.

Pn my PC (win7) it works fine for Zdoom but on doom95 it sounds choppy.

Thanks for this write up, I still use D95 fairly often alongside pretty much every other port. Like others, the two things that keep me coming back are the user friendly launcher - was a godsend when I was a child, especially - and of course nostalgia. I actually like the "fat guns" and low pitch sounds. Starting a network game is amazingly easy using that winsock thing, too.

Is there some way to avoid the rainbow palette glitch every single time without fail? The 'advanced settings' trick works 90% of the time, but things can still mess up in the middle of playing. (Sorry if this was answered, I looked for it but couldn't see it. It's 2 am though, the eyes are getting a little heavy..)

With the second method, which is permanent, there is the pallette problem at start, so you need to grab an item or start a new game so it fixes itself.

I haven't tried the tool PalettestealerSuspender yet.
Get it here: http://www.gamepatchplanet.com/pc_game_tools/
Read the included txt first.

VGA said:

Are you on Windows XP?

Nope, Windows 7.

Holering said:

Have you tried running it in Windows 9x/ME?

Yeah it ran fine but this was over a decade ago.

Holering said:

I personally find the Doom 95 launcher one of the best things about Doom 95, and that is why I still use it (I have 98 installed on my Piledriver system). I can pick whichever level and difficulty I want, all with a classic native Window interface. It's very professional and cleanly laid out. It basically works like a manager for everything Doom is capable of (demos, save games, hardware settings, level selection, difficulty, pwads, cheats, etc.). I do think Doom 95 is great. I think the only thing wrong is the midi music being broken with TNT (Human BBQ).

EDIT:
Yeah I agree with you about Doom 95 being great, even if it is 2014! I don't know any source port that manages wads, save-games, demos, settings, etc. It is even better that it is a native Windows interface with minimal resource use. Thanks much for the write-up! Your spoilers are the best!

Yeah the launcher is why I used Doom 95 a lot many years back. If I knew how and had the inclination to learn how I would make a front end for modern source ports that emulate the design of that launcher, while adding some basic things like custom pwad and iwad directory support, and of course loading more than one pwad at a time.

Mike.Reiner said:

Yeah it ran fine but this was over a decade ago.

What gpu did you use?

GeForce 2 MX200.

It was a really slow GPU, I had to upgrade when Doom 3 came out.

.

Sorry for bumping. I've tried this guide but after applying the fixes I get an error message saying something like "Doom 95 cannot access the Graphics card - check your Direct X! (error 100)"
Have I done something wrong and is there a way to fix it?
Trying to run it on a Lenovo G50-45 laptop with Windows 8.1 (with Bing) and AMD Radeon R2 Graphics card.

Looks like graphics driver incompatibility with this ancient DirectX software. It seems unlikely to make Doom 95 run fine on a Windows 8 laptop with a Radeon, I barely have it working on Win 7 on my desktop with an Nvidia card.

I suggest you turn to the Doom Retro source port if you value retro 640x480 visuals with a lot of twists. :-D

EDIT: Unless you use Virtualbox to create a win95, win98, winME or maybe winXP system.

Thanks, Will do. Don't know if it's Worth mentioning, but Before applying the fixes it actually started but with messed up Graphics, i.e. it showed a small game window in the upper left corner and it looked almost greyscale with some pixels in weird colors etc.

Cire said:

Thanks, Will do. Don't know if it's Worth mentioning, but Before applying the fixes it actually started but with messed up Graphics, i.e. it showed a small game window in the upper left corner and it looked almost greyscale with some pixels in weird colors etc.

Weird. Try removing the -emulate parameter from the mousefix launcher's options.

Yup, it's weird. Tried removing the -emulate parameter, didn't do any difference. Even tried uninstalling the mousefix, still the same error. I'll try rebooting and reistalling the mousefix and see if that helps.

Apparenty it wasn't related to the patches or anything like that. When I'm changing resolution to 640x480 I get that error message and when I change to 640x400 I get messed up Graphics.

Cire said:

it showed a small game window in the upper left corner and it looked almost greyscale with some pixels in weird colors etc.

Doom95's windowed modes work properly only with the desktop set to 8-bit (256 colors). The fullscreen modes won't work without the corresponding resolutions supported at the driver level. 640x480 used to be the lowest legacy res supported by Windows, that may no longer be true with Win7/8 and laptop chipsets, though.

Never_Again said:

The fullscreen modes won't work without the corresponding resolutions supported at the driver level.

Right. On my nvidia GPU if I add Doom 95's full screen resolutions (even 320x200 and 320x240!) as custom resolutions it will display them correctly. It does a surprisingly good job of scaling it.

ReFracture said:

Right. On my nvidia GPU if I add Doom 95's full screen resolutions (even 320x200 and 320x240!) as custom resolutions it will display them correctly. It does a surprisingly good job of scaling it.

That means it supports those resolutions, one way or another.

AMD drivers ... not so much, I would think :-D

Though thing is I can still set my desktop to 640x480, although not any lower than 32-bit.

There's another interesting fact here: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/historic/wdoom2.zip
This one doesn't suffer from the graphics bug on my computer, even on Windows 10 64-Bit. Infact, I haven't hardly noticed any problems with this, except no mouse control or proper fullscreen support. So for those of you having problems with Doom95, I'd recommend trying this out instead.

lmao yeah this works great on my Win 7 x64

Fullscreen works, too, just enable fullscreen and mash the + button to make it fill the screen. Also there is mouse control but I can't find a way to disable its vertical movement. It's using the native midi, too, so it's using my VirtualSoftSynth midi device with the sc-55 soundfont, so music sounds awesome, too. Although some sfx are being cut off.

I can't load custom wads though. It shows the "modified" warning so the parameters are getting read, but the maps are still the Doom 2 maps. Maybe it cannot load wads properly and you'd need IWAD merging methods, hmmm.... let's try.

It works, here is BTSX Ep1:

Argh please don't use Doom95...

Linguica said:

Argh please don't use Doom95...

No, we've dug deeper. Now we're using some obscure WinDoom beta thingy by some MS employees apparently.