I Found an Undocumented Command-Line Parameter in Heretic/HeXen!!

[Alex S.]

Interesting findings in the Heretic and HeXen executables. An undocumented debug feature. I have not seen any information about this previously and can only assume this was a command-line parameter that was given out by telephone support staff to customers whose game would hang while loading. All I have seen is that this command-line parameter suppresses the graphical startup screen and prints verbose (and very Doom-like) startup messages to the console instead. Also it can be noted that the HeXen "loading" music is in fact still played during text-mode before the game launches into 320x200 graphics mode.

 

I also made a video about it to demonstrate which can be viewed on my channel here

 

 

I have not been able to find anything about it documented on-line as of this post. If anyone knows anything about it, please let me know because I'm very curious to learn!

[Kebab_Hill12]

interesting...

[Alex S.]

5 minutes ago, ILIKEDOOM2 said:

interesting...

Indeed. I didn't make a big deal about it (or even mention it) during the video, but you can clearly see the same expletive that appears in Doom's executables at a "pretty close to it" offset. Maybe the team at Raven thought it was funny and left it in.

[MFG38]

That's a pretty cool find. Can't imagine it'd be very useful on computers running post-DOS operating systems, but still cool.

[Alex S.]

3 hours ago, MFG38 said:

That's a pretty cool find. Can't imagine it'd be very useful on computers running post-DOS operating systems, but still cool.

It'll always be useful. DOS will never truly die. It lives on in emulators and with the few neckbeards like me who still want control over our hardware ;)