[Released] Doom2 v1.7A to v1.7 Downgrade Patch

Sometimes it is useful to have a collection of historic versions of DOOM; often to achieve some specific end, such as running a demo for that version of DOOM, converting a troublesome binary DeHackEd patch to modern DeHackEd format, or even just for the hell of it -- hence the idgames archive's historic and exe_edit folders :)

With assistance of some ZDoom Forum members, notably wolfman, I have created a patch that downgrades DOOM2 V1.7A to DOOM2 V1.7; this is the next-to-last "missing" piece of the puzzle in creating all DOOM2 versions from V1.9. (The last missing piece is the file timestamps being wrongly set in FunDuke's 1.9 -> 1.666 patch, but I have notified him about it, so watch this space...).

Please would those who can/want to/care try this out and let me know if it gives them any trouble. It needs Windows NT V5 or above (i.e., 2000/XP/Vista). It may work on 95/95OSR2/98/98SE/ME/NT4 but I have no way to test those. It will NOT work on DOS/WIN31 and probably won't work on WIN31 with Win32s either.

Get it here!

Comments please?

MartinHowe said:The last missing piece is the file timestamps being wrongly set in FunDuke's 1.9 -> 1.666 patch, but I have notified him about it, so watch this space...[/B]

Yes it's on my todo-list.
It will come.

Greetings
Funduke

MartinHowe said:
It may work on 95/95OSR2/98/98SE/ME/NT4 but I have no way to test those. It will NOT work on DOS/WIN31 and probably won't work on WIN31 with Win32s either.

It runs (at least on a system with KernelEx) but it fails to patch the executable. In my opinion you (or whoever knows how to do it) should create a patch to be tested in DOSBox. It is silly to be patching a DOS program and not be able to do it in any DOS interface. It's not like patching programs is something DOS can't do.

There's nothing wrong with a Windows NT version (or a version for any newer OS), but it should still work in DOS. Officially nowadays DOOM runs on DOSBox and this is a patch to make a version that includes (runs with) the DOS executable.

If you wire me a large amount of £££ to buy a full copy of RTPatch (which is what id and Raven use for their DOS patchers), then maybe I will :P

XDelta?

Needs win32, sadly. And the batch scripting language on DOS is so poor that for a DOS patcher, an all-in-one .EXE file solution is probably necessary.

I there a good freeware patching suite even without a DOS version, let alone with? I have tried in vain to find such a thing :(

Binary patching for arbitrary data seems to be one of those things that gets commercialized as soon as someone comes up with something good, especially for windows.

I did some googling and the best freely available stuff is probably binary diff but it doesn't really meet the requirements.

edit: Hmm.. with a djgpp-compiled version of xdelta, the touch util from this page, and some batch files, something workable could be created.

edit again: I could possibly write a patcher, compiled with djgpp, that would use xdelta. Then it would work with DOS.

Submitted to the idgames archive.

I fixed it so that you may patch only the WAD/EXE if you want. Other than that, there's little that can be done for the forseeable future about the other issues -- without spending money I haven't got :( So this will have to do for "version 1" :P

Download (until present in the /idgames archive):

Archive: http://www.martinsobservationpost.net/system/D217A17.zip
Readme: http://www.martinsobservationpost.net/system/D217A17.txt

Great! I will check it out, downloaded it already. My timestamps issue will hopefully solved soon.

Greetings
Funduke