Question.

How can you tell what version your Doom (and Doom II) copy is?

As you start your game (before the actual title screen is displayed), the version number will be at the very top of the screen.

That would help, but I got the jewelcase versoin of Doom II, which doesn't have the EXE.

Uh, how are you supposed to play it then?

Maybe it came with that POS Doom95. Either way, you should get Zdoom.

Alright, I got the latest version of ZDoom, but when i try to run Doom, it gives me an error that says "W_GetNumForName: STBAR not found!".

you need to copy doom2.wad into your zdoom folder

ZDoom is an updated version of the Doom engine, not the game as a whole. As you can probably tell by it's very small file size, ZDoom doesn't contain all the resoures such as levels, graphics and sound... and obviously it won't work without them.

The thing that does contain these resources is called an IWAD; for Doom 1 it's doom.wad, for Doom 2 it's doom2.wad. Place at least one of these .wad files (both is fine, as it'll come up with a menu allowing you to chose which one to use) in the same directory as zdoom.exe and everything should be fine.

ZDoom.exe will also work with Final Doom, Heretic, Hexen and (to a limited degree) Strife.

BTW, if your doom(2).wad came with Doom '95, it is almost certainly the latest version of the wad (v1.9)

I've copied doomII.wad and doom.wad into the folder where ZDoom is. Doom II works fine, but doom.wad comes up with the same error I posted earlier.

Sounds like your doom.wad might be corrupted then, because STBAR is (as the name suggests ;)) the status bar and most definitely should be in the .wad file.

Incidentally, which version of Doom 1 are you using? Shareware (1 episode), registered (3 episodes) or Ultimate (4 episodes)?

I ask because another possiblity is that you're using a version of doom.wad other than v1.9, which ZDoom probably wouldn't like very much. If it's Ultimate it's definitely v1.9, but if it's shareware or registered your .wad could be virtually anything from 0.9 to 1.9

It's registered.

NiGHTMARE said:

If it's Ultimate it's definitely v1.9, but if it's shareware or registered your .wad could be virtually anything from 0.9 to 1.9

Just thought I'd mention that v1.1 was the first registered version.

Just thought I'd mention that v1.1 was the first registered version.

No v1.0 was the first it was EXTREMELY buggy it was also rapidly replaced because of all the bugs. Darkman-4, does your DOOM game have nightmare difficulty? If it doesn't its an EXTREMELY old version and you seriously need to update it. The versions that don't have nightmare difficulty are... v1.0, and v1.1.

-Dron