DeHackEd Problems

[DOOMinator]

Why ios it everytime I load up DeHackEd for DOOM II, it's full of errors? It was never like that when I used to use it years ago...how do I fix this? Everytime I make a patch for DOOM II, I can't use it cuz it's screwed up...it works fine for DOOM I, so why's it acting all screwy with II?

[The Ultimate DooMer]

Dehacked patches are version-sensitive. If you open your DooM 1 patch in notepad, you'll see "Doom version = 14" at the top of it. Change it to 20 (if you have DooM 2 v1.666) or 19 (if you have DooM 2 v1.9) and it should work.

[netnomad312]

Are you using Doom95? That would do it. You'd need a copy of the original exe, which IIRC is somewhere on this site...

[Enjay]

The Ultimate DooMer said:

Dehacked patches are version-sensitive. If you open your DooM 1 patch in notepad, you'll see "Doom version = 14" at the top of it. Change it to 20 (if you have DooM 2 v1.666) or 19 (if you have DooM 2 v1.9) and it should work.

Dehacked is version sensitive and the error messages you are seeing are almost certainly due to an incorrect version setting (very common problem when setting up dehacked). However, the information you need is in the dehacked.ini file, not the patch. Near the end of the dehacked.ini should be a section something like this...

# Doom version #
# 0 for Doom 1 1.666
# 1 for Doom 2 1.666
# 2 for Doom 2 1.7, 1.7a
# 3 for Doom x 1.9
# 4 for Ultimate Doom 1.9
version = 4

Just change the version = line to accurately reflect the version of doom you are using. If you are not using doom version 1.9, you should upgrade using the freely available patches. Then your choice is version 3 or 4. Version 3 is Doom 1.9 or Doom2. This is the executable version that does not have support for the 4th episode in doom1 (Ultimate Doom). Version 4 is still version 1.9 but is slightly different. It has support for the 4th episode and other minor changes.

As netnomad312 said, dehacked will not work with Doom95. If you don't have the original dos exe, you can use the 1.9 shareware one. I *think* that is version 3 (if not it will be version 4).

If you want some more dehacked info, including more stuff on setting up the ini file you could pop along to my site and read the dehacked tutorials.

[The Ultimate DooMer]

That's only for actually creating a patch, not one that's already been made. Although you could do that by changing the ini then overwriting the patch, it's quicker to change the number at the top of the patch. As long as you know the numbers, it's that simple. (of course if you don't, then you have to use the ini to create patches for different versions and get the numbers from them).

[Enjay]

When DOOMinator said "everytime I load up DeHackEd for DOOM II, it's full of errors" I assumed he meant that when he starts dehacked, the various fields in the thing editor have lots of pink "Error" messages where there should be things like sound entry numbers and so on. If that is the case, then the stuff I said about the ini should be the fix.

Forgive me for being thick here, but I don't see that there is much advantage in changing the "doom version =" line of a patch. I just tried a patch in Zdoom, and regardless of what I set the number at, Zdoom used the patch correctly (I tried 3, 19, 20002 even "fnord"). The only time it didn't load was if I removed the line completely.

But I'm assuming that the doom version number is actually in there, not for source ports (as they weren't around when dehacked was written) but to tell dehacked which version of the exe was used to write the patch. Again, this should be irrelevant. If dehacked is set up correctly, it "knows" the version of doom you are using with it, and the patch tells it the version of doom used to make the patch. I've never had any problem using dehacked to read patches created using one doom version when dehacked was set up for another. In fact, I'd assume (but am prepared to be corrected) that telling dehacked that a patch was made with a version of doom that it wasn't would actually confuse dehacked when it tries to load the data from the patch and convert it to be useable with the doom version actually loaded.

Thinking about it, I wonder what version specific information is actually in the patch? The "things" section is all simple field references rather than hex locations in the EXE, frame numbers and so on are again actually referenced to the numbers and not locations, even code pointers - whose actual number in the final column of the frame table varies from version to version - are referenced in a patch by the first frame they appear against and not by a hex location or similar. Maybe the text replacement thing needs to know an exact location? Bit numbers wouldn't be version specific would they?

[The Ultimate DooMer]

Enjay said:

Forgive me for being thick here, but I don't see that there is much advantage in changing the "doom version =" line of a patch. I just tried a patch in Zdoom, and regardless of what I set the number at, Zdoom used the patch correctly (I tried 3, 19, 20002 even "fnord"). The only time it didn't load was if I removed the line completely.

He could have been trying to load it with vanilla. I seem to recall having problems with patches running in different versions before I discovered ports.

Enjay said:

Thinking about it, I wonder what version specific information is actually in the patch?

Just the Doom version = ** number, I think.

[Enjay]

The Ultimate DooMer said:

He could have been trying to load it with vanilla. I seem to recall having problems with patches running in different versions before I discovered ports.

It's a long time since I've done that. But even running a patch with Vanilla, you have to do something like run dehacked with a -file or -load parameter to read the patch and automatically create a hacked exe, then you run the newly created hacked exe instead of the original. So, I'd have thought the sytem would still work. IE dehacked reads the patch for version X of Doom, the person has version Y of doom installed. Dehacked knows the patch is for version X, but also knows it is hacking version Y and does it appropriately because it knows the differences between the 2 exe's.

Still, I'm only guessing that's what's supposed to happen. We all know that what is supposed to happen and what actually happens are often different things. If you had a problem in the past and changing the doom ver number fixed it, then it fixed it. Until this thread I really hadn't even thought much about the doom ver number in the patch. :-)

[DoomRater]

One thing that ZDoom complained about with me was having an old DeHackEd version text patch didn't cause it to work right. That kinda stunk, I wanted to play Obituary correctly. With teh sonic blaster (invis BFG shot!) and the evil invis troopers replacing the Nazis.... and the Doom guy on a chain replacing Keen....