I found some "lost-ish" classic WolfenDoom wads.

[SiFi270]

I don't want this to come across as clickbait-y so full disclosure: It's really thanks to @Linguica for keeping it archived in the same place that Batman Doom's lost molotov behavior was recovered from a couple of years back, it's not that different from what we've already got, and if you're not too impressed with classic WolfenDoom to being with you probably won't be too impressed with this.

 

Anyway, that archive includes .sit files containing vanilla compatible versions of The Original Missions, the Nocturnal Missions, and Spear of Destiny. The versions on /idgames and Laz Rojas' website use a customized version of Boom by @Murdoch and need to be run in DOS, even though Laz's page for the Spear of Destiny TC says it's "available on the Macintosh for the very first time".

 

I'd like to digress a bit to say playing Doom and some TCs on MacOS classic has made some of the oversights in the WolfenDoom series more understandable. Some of them don't bother to change the text strings because the Mac version of DeHackEd just couldn't do that. The music was never replaced because the Mac version of Doom doesn't read music from the WAD files, but from a folder named "music", so replacing it is kind of a pain. They tried a fairly convoluted method for Batman Doom, but that was the one part I couldn't actually get working.

 

So what's a little interesting about these wads in .sit archives is, even though that's a format that only a Mac understands (as far as I know), there's still text string replacements and other things that would only work in the PC version. Except they didn't when I transferred them over to mine. I had to re-open them in WhackEd and then just re-save them to get them working, so I'm not sure what that's about. The patch for the Nocturnal Missions in particular had a header that WhackEd didn't understand, so I had to replace it in notepad first.

 

You may be wondering how the parts of this that required a specially customized engine would work in vanilla. Simply put, the Original and Nocturnal missions came with four .wad files each, one for the resources, and one for each episode, with the maps always placed so that the secret exit would be on Map15. When you kill Hans Grosse, the pillar near where the invulnerability's hidden in the Doom II version rises to reveal the gold key.

 

Oh look I'm already at the "where am I going, have I really said everything I want to" stage of my long posts. I guess I'll share my findings in a .zip file. It doesn't currently include the untouched version of noct.deh so I'll try to re-recover that.

 

One more thing I mean to look into is how the chainguns actually seemed to fire faster when playing WolfenDoom on a Mac. I'm not sure if I was imagining it, or the chaingun's already faster in the Mac version without patches, or there's some part of the patches that only the Mac version understands, so I'll have to do a bit more research there.

[Murdoch]

Well this takes me back.

 

Laz was a Mac user, obviously. I got involved as a beta tester on several WolfenDOOM projects first. When Boom came out, I offered to do some hacked executables that would bring the Original Missions, Nocturnal Missions and Spear of Destiny closer in line with the original games such as the episode selector even though it was Doom II, the bosses dropping the keys, things like that. I saw little point in redoing his Dehacked work in code so largely left that alone and coded the executables to autoload that as well as the WADs.

 

I have a vague recollection that at some point in the proceedings, he did get Windows running on his Mac using whatever emulation method was in at the time. I forget what it was called. I also believe that Dehacked itself changed patch formats a few times. First from the version 2 line which used a binary patch, to version 3 which used text based patches, and then possibly some further changes in the version 3 line? Someone like @Doomkid or @Redneckerz would know. So differences between the version 3 DOS line and/or the Mac version were likely behind the discrepancies you found in the different patches. Whacked likely has compensation for these differences and resaves the patch in a more usable format. Nocturnal Missions was the first release of the three I seem to recall. So maybe that was made with the Mac version of Dehacked, and the latter ones with the DOS version?

[SiFi270]

4 hours ago, SiFi270 said:

I guess I'll share my findings in a .zip file

Really thought I did that. If I did and it was removed because I should really be asking permission first or something along those lines, I'm sorry for repeating my mistake.

wd-vmac.zip

 

EDIT: Finally looked closer at the chaingun thing, and it does seem to be a difference in the Mac version rather than a change Laz made. The firing sound plays more rapidly, but the ammo in the hud counts down at a different speed to what you're hearing. The latter probably matches vanilla timing, but I'd have to record footage of both versions and play them side by side to be sure.

Edited June 8, 2021 by SiFi270

[Redneckerz]

Goodie, stuff about old source hacks. My favorite dish at the DoomWorld Pizzeria.

 

6 hours ago, SiFi270 said:

I don't want this to come across as clickbait-y so full disclosure: It's really thanks to @Linguica for keeping it archived in the same place that Batman Doom's lost molotov behavior was recovered from a couple of years back, it's not that different from what we've already got, and if you're not too impressed with classic WolfenDoom to being with you probably won't be too impressed with this.

 

Anyway, that archive includes .sit files containing vanilla compatible versions of The Original Missions, the Nocturnal Missions, and Spear of Destiny. The versions on /idgames and Laz Rojas' website use a customized version of Boom by @Murdoch and need to be run in DOS, even though Laz's page for the Spear of Destiny TC says it's "available on the Macintosh for the very first time".

 

I'd like to digress a bit to say playing Doom and some TCs on MacOS classic has made some of the oversights in the WolfenDoom series more understandable. Some of them don't bother to change the text strings because the Mac version of DeHackEd just couldn't do that. The music was never replaced because the Mac version of Doom doesn't read music from the WAD files, but from a folder named "music", so replacing it is kind of a pain. They tried a fairly convoluted method for Batman Doom, but that was the one part I couldn't actually get working.

 

So what's a little interesting about these wads in .sit archives is, even though that's a format that only a Mac understands (as far as I know), there's still text string replacements and other things that would only work in the PC version. Except they didn't when I transferred them over to mine. I had to re-open them in WhackEd and then just re-save them to get them working, so I'm not sure what that's about. The patch for the Nocturnal Missions in particular had a header that WhackEd didn't understand, so I had to replace it in notepad first.

 

You may be wondering how the parts of this that required a specially customized engine would work in vanilla. Simply put, the Original and Nocturnal missions came with four .wad files each, one for the resources, and one for each episode, with the maps always placed so that the secret exit would be on Map15. When you kill Hans Grosse, the pillar near where the invulnerability's hidden in the Doom II version rises to reveal the gold key.

 

Oh look I'm already at the "where am I going, have I really said everything I want to" stage of my long posts. I guess I'll share my findings in a .zip file. It doesn't currently include the untouched version of noct.deh so I'll try to re-recover that.

 

One more thing I mean to look into is how the chainguns actually seemed to fire faster when playing WolfenDoom on a Mac. I'm not sure if I was imagining it, or the chaingun's already faster in the Mac version without patches, or there's some part of the patches that only the Mac version understands, so I'll have to do a bit more research there.

I like this post for multiple reasons:

• It details the subtle differences between the PC and Mac versions of WolfenDoom and DeHacked
• There are indeed string replacements that weren't there with the DOS version, despite these string replacements being made for PC and not Mac in the first place!
• The custom engines primarily involve Grosse dropping a key and other minor things. After Laz found out that he could emulate much of what he wanted in DeHacked, he then would supply a DeHacked patch for the user to merge (As seen in the Astrostein series and beyond). Nevertheless, Joel Murdoch's work was a early entry in the history of Source modifications, what with them being made around 1998/1999.

I like this post also for essentially summarizing the various bits and pieces that were off regarding Batman Doom and the WolfenDoom series. They are scattered across a series of posts (Trust me, i know!) and therefore these aspects are often delegated to history.

 

The WolfenDoom Wiki page includes additional details on the custom Boom-derived engines used, which, at the very least for Spear of Destiny, takes its origins in Boom 2.01.

5 hours ago, Murdoch said:

Well this takes me back.

 

Laz was a Mac user, obviously. I got involved as a beta tester on several WolfenDOOM projects first. When Boom came out, I offered to do some hacked executables that would bring the Original Missions, Nocturnal Missions and Spear of Destiny closer in line with the original games such as the episode selector even though it was Doom II, the bosses dropping the keys, things like that. I saw little point in redoing his Dehacked work in code so largely left that alone and coded the executables to autoload that as well as the WADs.

Is that a summary of the changes you made to the Boom 2.01 (or 2.02, in the case of Nocturnal and Original Missions) or were there more additional changes? :)

 

5 hours ago, Murdoch said:

 

I have a vague recollection that at some point in the proceedings, he did get Windows running on his Mac using whatever emulation method was in at the time. I forget what it was called. I also believe that Dehacked itself changed patch formats a few times. First from the version 2 line which used a binary patch, to version 3 which used text based patches, and then possibly some further changes in the version 3 line? Someone like @Doomkid or @Redneckerz would know.

That is true. Before v3, DeHacked made a binary patch directly involving the executable - Older WADS use this to patch a specific version of the Doom executable (Usually 1.666, but extremely early works would do so against 1.2). Annoyingly so, Binary patches often wouldn't work with modern ports because of this. In order to fix this is to convert the patch over to a binary one:

 

5 hours ago, Murdoch said:

 

So differences between the version 3 DOS line and/or the Mac version were likely behind the discrepancies you found in the different patches. Whacked likely has compensation for these differences and resaves the patch in a more usable format. Nocturnal Missions was the first release of the three I seem to recall. So maybe that was made with the Mac version of Dehacked, and the latter ones with the DOS version?

It is my understanding that Mac DeHacked had two different editors, and they might not be vis-a-vis comparable to the DOS version. These are DeMacked, and Doominator.

[esselfortium]

1 hour ago, Redneckerz said:

It is my understanding that Mac DeHacked had two different editors, and they might not be vis-a-vis comparable to the DOS version. These are DeMacked, and Doominator.

Not quite. DeMackEd was solely used for editing patches, and Doominator was solely used for applying them.

 

Or, actually, I might be mixed up still. Doominator may have just been the tool used for applying the correct file type/creator codes to WAD files of PC origin, so that Mac Doom would recognize them as the correct file type. It's been a while...

[SiFi270]

A couple of other things that I meant to mention but forgot, and others may already have noticed if they checked out the .zip I shared: Some enemies are actually more accurate in this version, both compared to the versions based on Boom and the rest of the WolfenDoom series: the mutants shoot bullets from their chest guns instead of fireballs, and the officers use a pistol instead of a chaingun. Also, the versions based on Boom had bonus levels replacing maps 31 and 32, and these appear as map32 of escape.wad and faust.wad. In the former, the version based on Boom had you fighting Trans Grosse and his many doppelgangers in a Dead Simple-esque arena, but the vanilla-compatible version has bazooka-wielding soldiers instead, which appear to be based on enemies from Obituary. The latter seems about the same in both versions, only the mutants being hitscanners again makes it a lot harder.

[VanaheimRanger]

This is actually the first time I've heard of the WolfenDoom series, and I am very interested.  I see that the Original Missions require you to use the built in .exe, but what kind of issues would I expect if I played it in PrBoom+/dsda-doom?

 

 

 

[Murdoch]

24 minutes ago, VanaheimRanger said:

This is actually the first time I've heard of the WolfenDoom series, and I am very interested.  I see that the Original Missions require you to use the built in .exe, but what kind of issues would I expect if I played it in PrBoom+/dsda-doom?

 

 

It simply won't work. There are some things such as the bosses dropping keys when they die that will halt progress unless you cheat. Various people have done ZDoom updates to them, and I have been tempted to revisit them myself when I find the time.