The Complete Doom Accessory Pack?

So, I was looking at an eBay auction for some shovelware of Doom...

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/The-Complete-Doom-Accessory-Pack-PC-1994-/390624422396?pt=Video_Games_Games&hash=item5af307a9fc&_uhb=1

It looks interesting. First off, it comes with programs and cheats, which I've never seen in a Doom pack before(not into the shovelware thing.), and it comes in volumes, which I think there are four of them.

If you've used it before, is it any good? I'm not getting it, just interested. Not to mention, I have a feeling it has much to be desired. I'm pretty sure this is a more known shovelware than most, and it's also from 1994, and the box art looks horrbile! Are those balloons!?

So yeah... If you had it or experienced it, some sharing would be appreciated! :)

from disc cover:

Over 150 additional levels!

Woah, 5 megawads worth. I'll bet this is 151 really worthless PWADs though; with all the other mid-'90s DOS tools in there.

I'd hedge bets on a very early and buggy WinTEX and at least one DEU-alike.

Yeah, pretty much what I'm thinking. I don't think there are any good shovelwares out there...

Just download the ISO:
http://archive.org/details/doom-cds
Follow the "All items (most recently added first)" link...

Many of those CDs have duplicate files, but anyway don't expect anything too special. It's basically the same as downloading random early 90's files from /idgames. Sometimes you'll get lucky and find something that's not even on /idgames, or earlier versions of some wad. Instant DOOM Levels has a nice ebook though ("Tricks of the DOOM Gurus").

The Doomist said:

Are those balloons!?

I think they're meant to be bullet holes, with blood oozing from them. Apart from some re-worked IWAD maps there's not much you won't find in the archive.

Jayextee said:

I'd hedge bets on a very early and buggy WinTEX and at least one DEU-alike.

Would you settle for DMGRAPH v1.0 and WADED v1.10?

Yeah there's probably nothing in there but shitty 1994 maps everywhere. Not worth wasting money on.

The only good things about these CDs back then was that they carried Knee-Deep In The Dead for people who never played Doom before and were new to it, and they even provided instructions on the back of the disc case on how to order the registered version.

GreyGhost said:

I think they're meant to be bullet holes, with blood oozing from them. Apart from some re-worked IWAD maps there's not much you won't find in the archive.

Would you settle for DMGRAPH v1.0 and WADED v1.10?

ERMAGEHRD WADED

Back in the day I had several versions of that fucker: mainly because as the versions went on (and bugs got fixed), the size of level that it supported (as it was a non-extended DOS program) shrank and shrank. Mostly, I had a copy of 1.71 that I used for 'larger' (not by much) levels and 1.83 for the bulk.

I totally edited around the bugs, which were many. To this day in Doom Builder, I still switch habitually to Things mode before saving. ^^;

I often wonder how many of those early editors were really better than using pen + paper and entering coordinates and sector descriptors directly into some "Doom map script" language. Terrible GUIs, crippling limitations, confusing modal interfaces etc.

I certainly hated; fucking hated the DEU method of inserting vertices and then marking them to join the dots. Seemed utterly long-winded (and probably required a further amount of forward-planning than I approached maps with) compared to something like WadEd/DeeP's line-drawing method -- which is what Doom Builder has a very sleek version of, pretty sweet.

The whole 'prefab sector' (WadAuthor, EdMap if I recall correctly) thing seemed to make sense but was again uncomfortable.

Yeah, I tried a whole fuckton of editing tools back in the day. There was this DOS colormap/palette editor I may have to source and DOSbox though, which I remember being a pretty cool guy who did colours and didn't afraid of anything.

Actually you can also directly create N-sided sectors in DEU, without having to "build" them manually by inserting vertices and joining those with linedefs. And it's also possible to split a linedef or sector, then drag the resulting vertex or linedef to wherever you want. Try making a small map with DEU 5.21 in DOSBox sometime, you'll see it's not so bad. But read the deu.txt file first, it explains everything gently and thoroughly. It also has some other nice features like automatic creation of door or lift from a sector, and various other shortcuts. Biggest problem is lack of "undo" function, so one major mistake can mean you exit the GUI (without saving) and start it again from the DEU shell, in order to get the old state back. DEU 5.3 was going to address that, but it never got out of beta. Dunno how stable that version is, never tried it...

In the DOS days, I tinkered around with EdMap, but it was really unstable, so moved on to DCK. That one was pretty nice. Made a pretty big map with it, too bad it got lost in HD crash.

There were some others that used the same dot-to-dot method (DETH, OTOH. But wasn't this like, a fork of DEU or something).

I mean, it's academic now; Doom Builder is pretty much what I want a Doom map editor to be, and I'm not sure I'm curious enough to DOSbox DEU for history's sake.

Unless, of course, there were some sort of map-making challenge. I seem to be a sucker for those sorta things.

Yeah, DETH is apparently based on DEU 5.21, with also a few pieces from DEU 5.3. It has an "undo" function, so probably that's one of them. :-) I might try to make a map with it, if only because it has top-notch keyboard support, to the point you can actually throw away the mouse. Even Yadex can't claim that, and although it's possible to operate DEU entirely with keyboard, it's more clumsy than with DETH.