Original Doom for Mac OS

Is there any footage of the original (not source port) 1995 Ultimate Doom or Doom II for Mac on the interwebs? What are the differences from Vanilla DOS Doom? How does the music sound? What are the differences in menus?

The music isn't played from the WAD's own music lumps, but instead from a separate Music folder that contains midi conversions of the songs. It plays through QuickTime's built-in Roland general-midi instrument set, and sounds more or less the same as it does on a modern Windows install.

A true 640x400 mode is included, as "high quality," with the original high and low quality 320x200 settings listed as medium and low. The 128 visplane limit isn't increased to account for the possibility of more being drawn due to the higher resolution, though; I never ran into problems with it, but I'm sure it's possible.

I believe the ingame menus are largely or entirely kept as-is, but there are added, optional singleplayer and multiplayer launcher dialogs that can be opened by pressing certain keys during the added opening logo sequence*, which allow for level warping, skill level setting, PWAD loading, and other things that Doom used the command line for.

There's also some added options up in the menubar that can be accessed if you mouse up to the top of the screen while the game is paused, which if I remember right are mainly equivalent to the options in Doom's separate setup application.

Oddly, the keys it allowed to be set for actions were rather limited (modifier keys like ctrl could only be used for modifiers like strafe or run. Shooting was by default bound to "D" since ctrl wasn't allowed), but there was a third-party freeware program that allowed for better customization of key bindings.

*nothing noteworthy, just logos from id Software, Lion Entertainment (the company responsible for the port), and so on

Blame Apple for neglecting any compatibility between systems -_- If it weren't for that, we'd still have Mac Doom level editors.

Did anyone attempt to compile SLADE3 on a Mac system? The #ifdefs in the code only account for Linux and Win32; but it should be relatively easy to make sure it works on Mac too. (And if someone attempted to port it to an old PowerPC Mac, that'd help in making sure the endianness macros are used everywhere they need to be.)

Of course, there's no level editor yet, but one day there should be.

printz said:

Blame Apple for neglecting any compatibility between systems -_- If it weren't for that, we'd still have Mac Doom level editors.

If you're talking about DEMON, Hellmaker, and DEIMOS, they were barely functional on the systems they were created for 12+ years ago. No thank you.

I remember people talking about Hellmaker being totally fucking awesome completely trumphing all the windows and Dos editors of the time.

kristus said:

I remember people talking about Hellmaker Macs being totally fucking awesome completely trumphing all the windows and Dos editors PCs of the time.

FTFY. Sounds more like a typical case of Apple propaganda ;-)

How hard would it be to use the Cocoa framework to make a Mac OSX editor from scratch? If only I were a learning programmer and not a learning hardware guy...

Or you could wait until I complete Mocha Doom and whip together a pure Java map editor to go with it ;-)

kristus said:

I remember people talking about Hellmaker being totally fucking awesome completely trumphing all the windows and Dos editors of the time.

In 1998 it did. It still had some functionality I preferred over Doom Builder 1, but not so much in 2011, when DB2 arguably does everything it did and more, and does it better*. :P

*barring a couple of interface-related differences that I'd still love to see in a modern editor.

Thank you, esselfortium, this is the info I needed :)

Gez said:

Did anyone attempt to compile SLADE3 on a Mac system?

The Makefile doesn't seem to be set up to find the gl headers on Mac OS X. (And I have no interest in touching Makefiles.)

Softpedia say, they have a DOOM2 Demo version (Yes, I know, there is _NO_Doom2 Demo...) for Mac:

You can search their site and will probably find it...
And...they have a Doom(I) Demo, too...

Actually, that download link is to a zip archive containing DOOM2.WAD and the Mac Doom II executable. Someone should probably report it to Softpedia as a warez upload.

It has a different date 9-23-94 from the others listed on the wiki but it is version 1.7.

Has been linked to in the past. If the past is any indication, this thread is going to hell after anonymization as well.

Yep, and it's also apparently not even the "original" release; it's for Mac OS X,and I can't do anything with it using my Mac OS 9-bearing G3.

Heh I want to try it on a G4 with Tiger I have sitting around. Who knows, maybe it IS a demo and the actual lock is in the executable only?

esselfortium said:

Actually, that download link is to a zip archive containing DOOM2.WAD and the Mac Doom II executable. Someone should probably report it to Softpedia as a warez upload.

I already did this before, when Activision was responible. They _confirmed_ that this is no illegal download. :-)

I have an old Mac and a copy of the original Mac Doom. I've certainly had it running before. I could probably do some screenshots or something if people are really interested.

DoomGater said:

I already did this before, when Activision was responible. They _confirmed_ that this is no illegal download. :-)

So how is it a demo? There are hardcoded limitations in the executable only?

If Activision is indeed OK with this state of things, then that shuffles the cards a bit regarding what's legal to distribute. I see no disclaimers saying that e.g. you're not supposed to stick the WAD into another source port or platform (unless you need to actually run it to see them).

fraggle said:

I have an old Mac and a copy of the original Mac Doom. I've certainly had it running before. I could probably do some screenshots or something if people are really interested.

Yeah, do some pics, please!

Maes said:

So how is it a demo? There are hardcoded limitations in the executable only?

If Activision is indeed OK with this state of things, then that shuffles the cards a bit regarding what's legal to distribute. I see no disclaimers saying that e.g. you're not supposed to stick the WAD into another source port or platform (unless you need to actually run it to see them).

For $25, I'm thinking it the uses of the word demo and trail might be mistake.

I asked Activision to check http://mac.softpedia.com (I am not allowed to post the full link to the file were, sorry...) and tell me, if this is a pirated 'warez' version or not.
And I received this answer:

"Response (Russell Johnson) - 02/01/2007 04:07 PM
We check out the website you sent us and it is just a demo for the game. We do not support demos for our games. This is not pirated software. If you have any further questions, please contact our website: http://activision.custhelp.com"

Just right now, I forwarded this to Zenimax; let's see what they say :-)

Edit 14th Feb 2011: No answer. I guess they don't care. So, can we have the complete link again, or will it be removed again by the moderators?

Vermil said:

For $25, I'm thinking it the uses of the word demo and trail might be mistake.

Well, seeing how I didn't pay anything to download it, I think the $25 refers to the full product, which implies that there must be some activation or gameplay time limit to it. I'll try it on my G4 and see what gives, OK? :-p

I managed to get it started under 10.4 using Rosetta. It turned out to be a Classic app, however installing it was counterintuitive, at least for a Mac noob like me: just click on the ZIP and it create a folder on the desktop.

Clicking on the Doom II icon made Classic start, proving that it's a classic application. Dunno what the _MACOSX stuff is for, however it doesn't seem to be a native OSX executable.

The application itself is extremely crude: at first there is a wish-it-was Doom 95 "launcher" that allows you to play solo, multiplayer or "load a WAD". It also sets the display to 256 colors, which works like ass under Classic: on a G4@733 MHz with 640 MB of RAM it gets either full 35 fps framerate (if you set it to 256 colors, but it glitches unless you also set the resolution to 640*480), and tops 15-20 with trucolor or hicolor. The native resolution is hard to make out, but it looks like 640 * 480. There is indeed a switching between low, medium and high detail modes and resolutions, like it was mentioned. The lower part of the display was glitchy in most video modes I tried, exhibiting a delayed update/HOM effect. This was worse the higher the native resolution of the display, but then again, this is under compatibility emulation.

There are only sound effects, no music (at least under Classic emulation), the keys are non-configurable and I couldn't find the fire key :sigh:

The Q key turns on a FPS meter, while most F-keys seem to work, though I need to e.g. press Option + F11 to set the gamma otherwise OSX takes over.

It's overall unimpressive, and looks like a hack job. There is no documentation, no configuration (maybe it can work with a DOS default.cfg, dunno, however it did not create one).

Now as to whether it's a legit demo... I don't know. There are no special messages, no special screens, no reminders, no nagware....maybe the fact that you can't fire is the crippled feature, I dunno, unless someone can get it to work. There were no other limitations I could readily see.

Update: Actually I moved the mouse around and saw there were some finder menus to fiddle with. I chose mouse/joystick input and firing worked, but still no keyboard configuration panel. The about panel says:

Doom II @1994 id SOftware, Inc

Macintosh Conversion by Lion Entertainment, Inc.

Version 1.0a1 03/01/95"

Well...let's see if it will let me finish a level.

Edit: yeah, it seems pretty complete. Other than the firing (and as I noticed, running too) with the keyboard problem, the only other glitch was that you could not idclev to MAP30 but were sent to MAP14 instead.

The Fire key was bizarrely moved to either D or F, I seem to recall, since Control can't be bound to anything.

It's weird that this is a Classic app - I could not get it to start properly in OS 9, as the only way I could get the ZIP to extract was using ZipIt which doesn't seem to treat the resource forks properly (ah, Mac file systems, I hate thee so). Upon trying to alter the executable's Creator and File Type using a third-party program to match those of another application, Mac OS still tried to find a program to open it with, or else tried to launch it in SimpleText (which has a memory limit that is too low to display the "text").

Well, I've got an installation of OS X 10.3.9; maybe I could extract it using that, boot back in to OS 9, and give it another shot.

Probably they mixed OSX type zip/installers with a Classic app, so perversely the only way to extract this and use this is to have both OS X and Mac OS Classic.

I had OS 9 on a old HDs .dmg but not on an actual bootable disk, that's why I used the Classic emulator (I actually find Apple's .dmg system quite versatile as you can treat anything like a disk, and I could set up Classic to run off that).

Now, there are actually two executables, and I suspect that this is in fat binary format, however manually extracting the stuff doesn't seem to work, it needs to parse some metadata present in that .DS_Store file or somesuch.

Also, read the first post about this version...no music to go with it, it seems.

Is anyone aware of what versions/patches were released for this port of Doom?

@Maes:

Sounds like an early version or test release.

The lack of music might be due to its incompleteness, but I'd say it's more likely because of the lack of the included Music folder. Like I mentioned above, the official Mac port of Doom didn't bother trying to read the MUS-format lumps from the wad, and just played them through QuickTime's midi playback using an external folder of pre-converted midis.

Configuration and documentation were both available with the version I owned on CD-ROM; I think the documentation was separate (there was a printed manual, as well as some readme files, I believe), but the configuration was built in to the program, accessed via the standard Mac menu bar when the game is paused. As I mentioned above, there were some odd and unnecessary limitations placed on key bindings (leading to the unusual default of D as a fire key), but there was at least one third-party app I remember being able to use to set them without those limitations.

I remember having the same problem with the lower portion of the display not updating properly in Classic, before there was much in the way of usable sourceports for Mac OS and I was trying to play Batman Doom with it. In pre-OS X systems, though, I never had any performance problems, though I had to switch to low or medium quality to get it to run at an acceptable framerate on an ancient Powerbook 180c that I had for a while as a kid.

It's not an installer, just a zip archive, so an OS 9 (or 8, or 7) install with Zip software installed (Stuffit Expander should be usable for this) should be able to easily extract it.

The _MACOSX folder is probably just there from whoever uploaded it to Softpedia. That combined with the old version, lack of music and docs, and the fact that it's in a zip archive, rather than .sit (or a self-extracting installer program), makes me find it incredibly unlikely that this upload was officially condoned by Lion Entertainment for demo purposes. It's probably just some guy that uploaded it to the site, and who happened to have an outdated version.

I remember the Doom2 and Ultimate Doom CD-ROMs I owned had some included update patches for older versions, but I don't know much about the older versions because I never owned them.

Also, either my version of Doom2 was somehow corrupted, or it was a general issue that some of the converted music tracks were bugged. For ages I had thought it was an intentional decision for Doom2's songs that were used more than once to have slightly different instrument sets audible on different maps, but it turns out it was just a bad conversion that somehow left out some of the instruments. Or maybe Lion Entertainment did it intentionally to make the repeated songs vary from map to map? The world may never know.

EDIT: And..yeah, I don't think zip archives recognize resource forks at all. I'm not entirely sure how you were able to get the application to run at all with its resource fork missing, unless there's been an extension to the zip format since I last read about it. That's the most likely case, I suppose.

Hmm so if I create a Music directory and put some properly named midis in there, would it play them? Do you remember the layout? Also, can it read stuff out of an external config file? This version doesn't seem to be able to remember anything, and I have no idea if it can be coerced to take command line parameters.

If screenshots are requested, somebody teach me a way to easily take them and save them without having to quit the application each time ;-)

About resource forks: unzipping this with a PC into a CD-ROM and then having the Mac read it (I have no usable USB media that this Mac can read :-( resulted in nada. Not even icon visualization in Finder.

OTOH just clicking on the .zip directly from the CD-ROM, resulted in a desktop installation and somehow "cooking" the files into a new iconified folder which just has "Doom II" and "Doom II.wad". Savegames are also saved into that folder as "DoomSave01.dsg" etc.

But I can only confirm that this installation method worked on the latest Tiger 10.4.11, and nothing else beyond or before that. And you still need a PPC Mac with Classic installed to try it (dunno if you can take not one, but two steps back with an Intel based one).