A cry for help

If anyone knows WAD file structure very well and could take a look at a file I have, I would be most grateful. It's a large episode (9 big levels, and damn good fun if I may say so myself) I made for the Aliens TC back in '96, managed to find it on a disk at the back of a cupboard this morning, but the main WAD file is corrupted.

Doom ignores it completely, and loading it up in the various WAD editors gives a bunch of errors...though they do recognize it as a WAD file, the entries are all garbled (I'm hoping it's just a few bytes mixed up in the headers, that can be recognized and fixed... probably no such luck, but worth a try).

If you provide the URL, or email me the file at wadedit@marchmail.com, I'll be glad to take a look at it.

http://www.happyhappy.freeserve.co.uk/stuff/ADoomEp2.zip

About 300KB Zip.

The file had no entry directory, and some of the other data is also overwritten. From $24660 in the file one can see a FAT directory structure with subfolders DOOM2, RAWCOPY, MAHJONGG, MONOPOLY etc. Sometimes the FAT gets written into files, I experienced similar things. You must have had an ugly crash.

Anyway, I have already reconstructed the directory, and right now I'm manually adding refernces to the existing entries.

Urk hope you don't find my Porn directories! Err not that I had any, of course.

It was 5 years ago I backed up that file onto disk, so no idea what might have happened.

Anyway, thanks for looking at it..

Here is the reconstructed file:

http://wadedit.50megs.com/reconst.html

I have made it public instead of emailing it to you, so others could take a look at it and maybe even 'fix it' more. Anyway, it seemed to have 4 maps. The first one is almost gone. The second and third are ok, after loading it into WadAuthor I was able to play them. The 4th one has all the entries except b[SECTORS]b.

Well at least some of it is still there heh. Looking at it in WinTex, Map02 looks like the first level, Map03 the second and Map04 the third - so not sure what the Map01 data you found is.

Oh the nostalgia, looking at the maps brought tears to my eyes, such happy times... :p

Thanks muchly for all the work you've done... do you think you'll be able to pull anything more out of it?

The rest of the data seems to be garbage, so I guess this is all we've got. I encourage you to download my editor (it opened even the orignal file you sent me). It's at

http://wadedit.50megs.com/

If you insert a "REJECT" and "BLOCKMAP" after the "SECTORS" entries, you will be able to load the maps into WadAuthor.

You did a nice job hacking it back.

FYI, MAP01 needs 2 hex 00 after THINGS (you accidently typed blanks in). So technically, that is not THINGS and shouldn't be treated as such.

MAP01 has no vertexes so what was displayed in MAP01 just happened to be a memory area controlled by your task, but not related to the level - so that should be checked out.

That file was quite useful. It was an easy way to check out some DeePsea error recovery code for missing lumps - I never did find a good hosed level for testing:))

Well, err, glad to be of service...

I've found another WAD file that seems to be a slightly earlier version (by a few days) of the first - it's also similarly corrupted, so is probably a result of the same crash.


So, for anyone interested in taking a look at it...

http://www.happyhappy.freeserve.co.uk/stuff/AEp2old.zip


It might be a close enough version that data from one can be used in the other, maybe they will have different parts corrupted.. who knows? :)