What is the best option for testing Heretic maps?

I have been replaying Heretic lately and it's got me wanting to make a map for it. I want to stick with the vanilla format instead of moving over to GZDoom to keep things simple, and I was wondering what my best options are for testing Heretic maps for Limit Removing. I know there's Chocolate Heretic but I am not fond of the low resolution to play in the Chocolate engines. Should I just do GZDoom with Doom Strict compatibility?

Still low resolution, but if you don't want limits to be an issue, try Heretic+ (Heretic-Plus) by entryway. Since it's based on the DOS executable, you also need DOSBox.

I think if you test with both GZDoom and Doomsday you should be fine. More basic ports with higher resolutions unfortunately do not exist.

Doom Legacy can be checked as well, 3DGE can load Heretic maps too now, and Eternity shall soon follow but isn't there just yet.

Unfortunately, the author of Crispy Doom has zero interest in non-Doom games so Crispy doesn't support Heretic, Hexen, or Strife. Otherwise it would have been the perfect port to test limit-removing Heretic in not-low-res.

The problem with all those ports is that their Heretic support is probably even less faithful than ZDoom's. Better stick to those who either have the game fully working and having put some effort behind it, and have been known to work for a longer time period.

Legacy in particular is a port I cannot recommend for testing game physics, the engine even shows some serious issues with Doom maps - and 3DGE's support is probably too recent to be usable as a serious testbed - in fact I think in this case the maps may be used to test the port, not the other way around.

Crap, I totally forgot about jHeretic. If you also combine it with 3D models and high resolution textures, it looks awesome. It enthralled me, as I used it to play Heretic for the first time ☺️

Hmmmm, using regular ZDoom is seeming like a good option. I don't use it for anything else right now so I can keep it in compatibility settings that I don't want on GZDoom. Thanks for the suggestions everyone! 

The best option is actually Crispy Heretic. Sure it's not supported anymore, but the past versions still work fine. As far as I can see, Crispy is the only limit-removing port for Raven doom-engine games that doesn't needlessly revamp the core gameplay, so I'm sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

Oh, I didn't know there was a Crispy Heretic. That's good to know. I will look it up. 

2 hours ago, Grain of Salt said:

The best option is actually Crispy Heretic. Sure it's not supported anymore, but the past versions still work fine. As far as I can see, Crispy is the only limit-removing port for Raven doom-engine games that doesn't needlessly revamp the core gameplay, so I'm sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

According to the Doom Wiki, Crispy Heretic is not available any more. And, yeah, as far as I can tell I can't seem to locate a place I can download one of these older versions anywhere. Any chance you know where I can find it?

Hopefully this link should work:

http://www.greffrath.com/~fabian/crispy-doom_1.5.zip

1 hour ago, Grain of Salt said:

Hopefully this link should work:

 

http://www.greffrath.com/~fabian/crispy-doom_1.5.zip

Indeed it does! I couldn't help but notice while playing Hell's Maw to test it that there's some weird differences in GZDoom. Namely, lava damages way faster in Crispy. Sort of concerning that such an important part of the flow is nerfed in my source port of choice.

Also I find myself wondering why there isn't a Boom equivalent to Heretic. Does it not need the mapping enhancements? Something like PrBoom+ for Heretic would be awesome so I could play in widescreen with this truer gameplay, but alas I don't expect I shall see the day that such a thing is made and I am no programmer.

5 hours ago, NecrumWarrior said:

Indeed it does! I couldn't help but notice while playing Hell's Maw to test it that there's some weird differences in GZDoom. Namely, lava damages way faster in Crispy. Sort of concerning that such an important part of the flow is nerfed in my source port of choice.

 

If nobody reports a bug it cannot be fixed. This is the first time I heard about it that it's not correct.

Obviously it will be correct in the next version again, the bug was introduced last year when the sector damage code got some enhancements.

8 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

If nobody reports a bug it cannot be fixed. This is the first time I heard about it that it's not correct.

Obviously it will be correct in the next version again, the bug was introduced last year when the sector damage code got some enhancements.

Ah, okay! Not sure why I didn't realize this was a bug. Glad I could be of help.

On 16/4/2017 at 6:58 PM, Grain of Salt said:

The best option is actually Crispy Heretic. Sure it's not supported anymore, but the past versions still work fine. As far as I can see, Crispy is the only limit-removing port for Raven doom-engine games that doesn't needlessly revamp the core gameplay, so I'm sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

Is there a way to play Crispy Heretic with lower detail? Like in Doom one could change it with F5, but that is not possible in Heretic. 

On 4/16/2017 at 5:09 PM, NecrumWarrior said:

According to the Doom Wiki, Crispy Heretic is not available any more. And, yeah, as far as I can tell I can't seem to locate a place I can download one of these older versions anywhere. Any chance you know where I can find it?

https://github.com/fabiangreffrath/crispy-doom/issues/132

Read this. Fabian explains how to make Heretic, Hexen, and Strife compile again.