is there any source code for 1993's doom alpha and beta build I can look unto?

[Doomkid]

Woah, is it possible to re-enable sound in the press release or 0.5 version somehow? I know the sounds would have to be manually added back into the wad but I’d be really interested in alphas with sound. Assuming it’s not a giant pain in the ass to do!

[SaladBadger]

I've been reverse engineering 0.5 lately, the sound support is insanely limited. I haven't looked too much into it, but the only functions linked in seem to be related to playing music. The game tries initializing DMX on startup, but under DosBox under default circumstances, this always fails. (You can see the "DMX_Init failed" message if you use a pipe). In the offchance it did work, the game then tries to load a song named "KICKBUTG", which isn't present in the data.

 

There's no reference to the sound configuration file the press release beta has, so I wonder if it's expecting a very specific configuration. The call to DMX_Init doesn't match anything I've seen from the heretic/hexen source or the leaked DMX source code, so I have no clue. I'm not well versed enough in the low level sound hardware programming to make heads and tails of this.

 

As for the press-release beta, I recall xttl had a working WAD file with sounds and a working sound.cfg file. Most of the sound code functions, but there's still a lot of bugs.

 

WRT COLORS12: I have found no reference to this in the game's source at all. COLORS12 does not appear in the binary once, and I haven't seen anything that does something silly like take COLORS15 and changes it to COLORS12 and then uses the new string to load the lump, so I don't think it's ever used. On whole though the high color mode seems even less stable than 0.4 though so 0.5 probably isn't a good reference. (edit: code to generate COLORS12 is present in dcolors in the id doom utilities)

Edited September 26, 2020 by SaladBadger

[Murdoch]

On 2/11/2020 at 12:51 PM, Angelloproduct said:

Just wondering did killough worked  or set contribution on assessing ID on doom's code? I found a .txt file that included his name

 

I worked closely with Lee during the development of MBF. Some of it's features came from me badgering him for help coding features for projects I was working on at the time. I am not entirely sure I understand your question but basically the "predigree" goes from the original source release to DosDoom, to Boom, then to MBF. I dimly recall him corresponding with the id crew about various things (perhaps to do with his website on Doom's history) but if he had direct access to any original source code he never told me. As others have said, the MBF code is the closest you will get to the PR beta code. It was not original, but very closely modeled. Lee is an incredibly bright guy, a hell of a coder, and VERY detail oriented.

Edited September 26, 2020 by Murdoch

[TenenteZashu]

As far as I can tell if you really want to play the alpha version you gotta reverse engineer it but there's a mod that lets you play with scrapped concepts (mostly from the DOOM Bible), it's called Delta DOOM

[Randy87]

4 hours ago, Murdoch said:

As others have said, the MBF code is the closest you will get to the PR beta code.

 

I've seen this mentioned a few times before, but I added support for PRB beta emulation into a custom chocolate-doom port many years ago and found MBF's emulation rather inaccurate. I don't remember the details off the top of my head exactly, though I could just go check it out again. The rocket launcher may have been missing the delay and there was something about the plasma projectiles, maybe offsets or order?

[Gez]

The thing I remember about the actual press release beta behavior is that corpses don't get squished by doors/elevators/etc. and instead block the movement.

 

This I discovered by playing it and getting stuck in E1M2 in the hidden room where you can see the chainsaw secret area, because a monster corpse prevented the lift from getting back up to the stairs.

[Redneckerz]

On 9/25/2020 at 4:05 PM, viti95 said:

I'm also interested in this, there are some functionality that was scrapped in the older alphas and betas of Doom, such as the Sierra Hi-Color support and additional rendering modes, that would be nice to add to FastDoom. I've been reverse engineering the COLORS12 and COLORS15 lumps from the prerelease beta, and for now i've discoverd that COLORS15 is using RGB555 pixel format, but i still don't know what format is using COLORS12 (i think COLORS12 is wrong as it should be using RGB444 format, and that's why it isn't used in the alphas/betas at all).

 

Maybe somebody can check my discovery, and if the information is correct add it onto the DoomWiki @Redneckerz

 

If confirmed, then sure :) I appreciate this!

[Murdoch]

5 hours ago, Randy87 said:

 

I've seen this mentioned a few times before, but I added support for PRB beta emulation into a custom chocolate-doom port many years ago and found MBF's emulation rather inaccurate. I don't remember the details off the top of my head exactly, though I could just go check it out again. The rocket launcher may have been missing the delay and there was something about the plasma projectiles, maybe offsets or order?

 

It's possible. It was nearly 20 years ago. To be fair I never did a side by side comparison myself. Given how fastidious Lee was I would be surprised if there were significant differences but then again no one is perfect.

[datajake]

On 9/25/2020 at 9:31 PM, SaladBadger said:

In the offchance it did work, the game then tries to load a song named "KICKBUTG", which isn't present in the data.

 

I have the missing song.

KICKBUTG.zip