novert.com help & key remapping help

I can't figure out how to get novert.com to work with doom.exe (I'm using winXP).

I click a batch file that just says novert, then I click a batch file to start doom.exe but there's still vertical movement (also tried starting novert from a cmd prompt).

Why two separate batch files? Run novert right before you run Doom in the same batch.

I didn't realize you could do that and there was no mention of that in the txt file. Thanks!

An excellent utility. My doom.conf for dosbox executes it at startup.

Windows XP onwards don't really have proper DOS. If you're using a modern version of Windows and want to use Vanilla Doom, it's best to use an emulator like DOSbox.

Is that just because of the music/sound? This comp has no sound card, so I set the Music Card to NONE, and the Sound FX Card to PC Speaker, and doom.exe seems to work great with novert and Commander Keen sound effects.

Now I'm trying to find a very simple/basic key remapper for DOS so I can change the weapon keys. Any recommendations? I know you can do that in DOSbox, but I'd like to avoid it.

You could just use Chocolate Doom. It lets you rebind all keys...

But since you're talking about Windows XP, you should remember that your OS is *not* DOS: DOS programs are just running in an emulator on it. There's remapping programs all around... a quick web search seems like this one should work.

I already use and like chocodoom, but I'd like to play vanilla also.

That remapping program doesn't work with vanilla doom and neither do any of the others I've tried (they work fine in notepad but not doom). I did see one page where someone said doom overrides keyboard TSRs - link.

On myk's doom2.net page he mentions zdkeyremap might work, but it won't recognize the driver on my comp even after multiple restarts.

What about edited doom.exe/doom2.exe files that change the default weapon numbers?

I guess you could hex edit it. I don't think dehacked can change it.

I assume if you're running XP your system specs probably aren't as such that it would be up to running dosbox smoothly, is it?

You've got to remember that Windows XP is not running DOS. TSRs won't work because they simply don't fit into that operating system (and rightly so; TSRs are a gross hack to feign multitasking capabilities).

I don't know how the key remapping programs work. I'm not running any Windows box to test it... but I imagine Doom is grabbing raw keycodes or the NTVDM subsystem does operations on a lower level than they operate (if they only affect Win32, for example).

Any ideas where to look in the hex editor for the weapon keys? I looked at doom.exe v1.9 but have no idea.

Mike.Reiner, I haven't actually tried DOSbox before, so I'm not sure (my comp is 14 years old though). I'd like to avoid DOSbox if possible, since I feel I might as well use chocodoom instead. So far I've played through doom.exe ep1 and ep2 on my XP comp and it's really fun!

14 years old... yeah I wouldn't consider Dosbox then. It would run awful.

I have a PC that is about that old, maybe a little newer. I run a dual boot of XP and 98SE on it, great for playing tons of older stuff.

I really don't know where you would want to look as far as hex editing the executable goes.