Bus Error with Doom Legacy & pl2.wad

[rderosier]

I can play The Plutonia Experiment with Doom Legacy 1.43beta on my Intel Mac
running Mac OS X 10.5.6. However, when I try to play the new Plutonia 2, I get
a Bus Error immediately without any other output to the terminal. The following
is the command line I executed:

"Doom Legacy.app/Contents/MacOS/Doom Legacy" -IWAD plutonia.wad -file PL2.WAD

Has anybody else experienced this?

[myk]

It might be due to the MAPINFO lump. I'm not sure in what version Legacy started adding MAPINFO support, but the lump contains ZDoom specific info that affects some engines adversely. This issue should be solved for the next release.

Replace the current MAPINFO in the WAD with this and let me know if it works.

[esselfortium]

It should also be noted that PrBoom, PrBoom-Plus, ZDoom, Odamex, and Doomsday Engine are also available for Intel Macs (most of them also available for older PPC Macs as well), and that many mods will have much better compatibility in some of those engines than in Legacy.

[Graf Zahl]

Legacy 1.43 does not have MAPINFO support. That was added for version 2.0 which as of today is still unfinished (and actually has not seen any active development for a year or so.) Unfortunately the MAPINFO parser in Legacy 2.0 is not fully compatible with ZDoom because the developers thought they 'could do it better.'

Like esselfortium I also have to recommend using another engine. Legacy 1.43 is old, contains serious flaws and doesn't see any active development whatsoever so problems are unlikely to get resolved.

[Quasar]

A bus error is a rare sort of thing in my experience. The only thing I've ever heard of causing them is a memcpy or memset to an unaligned address on hardware that does not support it. As for what causes it, who knows - you'd have to run it in a debugger. Like Graf said, there's probably nothing you can do about it, and you'll have to use a different port or give up trying to play that particular mod.

[rderosier]

Thanks for the help!

Below are some comments regarding your comments:

1. I was happy to see the one comment regarding Legacy not supporting
MAPINFO, since I did not know how to replace it as suggested.

2. I use Legacy because I found it to be the most stable for me, ie, I never
had a problem with it ever except at the end of PLUTONIA & EVILUTION
when it unexpectedly died and I couldn't ever complete their final levels.
But I thought I could live with that. However, I had the following issues
with the below suggested engines:

PrBoom - I just didn't like not having mouse-look and could not live
with movement coming from the mouse.
PrBoom+ - I had never heard of this one until now, but will give it a try.
ZDoom - I had the same issues with this as with PrBoom (I think).
Doomsday Engine - I used to use this until I came across some level
that had barricades moving up and down that never
went high enough to allow me get under them. This
was kind of a show stopper (without dealing with
clipping).
Odamex - I had never heard of this one until now, but will give it a try.

[esselfortium]

You can disable forwards/backwards mouse movement in any sourceport, including PrBoom. In addition, PrBoom's OpenGL mode allows for mouselook and ZDoom's software renderer does as well. Just have to enable it in the mouse options.

PrBoom, PrBoom-Plus, and ZDoom are all far more stable and compatible than Legacy. Particularly moreso than the incomplete Mac port of Legacy which isn't even fully capable of supporting the few Legacy projects that are worth playing.

[Grazza]

Regarding forward/backward mouse movement, you can turn this off quite easily, and independently of enabling mlook (if available).

In vanilla, use a TSR called novert (it's in the archive).
In prboom/prboom+, set vertical sensitivity to zero (via the menus).
In Zdoom, you can edit the ini file. I forget the name of the setting (don't have Zdoom on this computer), but it should be fairly obvious, as it is the entry for vertical mouse sensitivity (set it to zero).

And yeah, prboom+ has the option of mouselook, if you really want it, as long as you use OpenGL rendering.

Edit: near-simultaneous posting! But note that prboom doesn't have mlook, unless this is a very recent change that I am unaware of (sorry, I don't keep all that up-to-date with regular prboom, as prboom+ pretty much obsoletes it). You need prboom+ for that.

[esselfortium]

Grazza said:

In Zdoom, you can edit the ini file. I forget the name of the setting (don't have Zdoom on this computer), but it should be fairly obvious, as it is the entry for vertical mouse sensitivity (set it to zero).

Indeed, though enabling "Always Mouselook" should do the job just as well, since he's said he'd like to use mouselook :)

[Grazza]

Yes, but for other people who might be reading this thread who don't want mlook, it is useful info. It isn't at all obvious how to use Zdoom without mouse move or mlook.

BTW, in the past I always found Legacy a lot more stable than Zdoom. Can't say much about that ATM, as I don't use either very much. (And as for compatibility, Legacy changes a lot less of the original behaviour than Zdoom does, of course. But this probably isn't the place or time for a discussion of that.)

[DaniJ]

Mac OS is a relatively new supported platform as far as Doomsday goes (basically since skyjake switched to OS X as his primary development platform).

Most likely the version you (rderosier) tried was the latest 1.9.0-beta5.1 release which does have a known issue involving perpetual moving planes getting stuck occasionally (sounds like the issue you encountered).

Note that Doomsday 1.9.0-beta6 is to be released imminently (probably this weekend) and that should fix the problem you encountered, as well as several other (minor) rendering glitches which were found when playing Plutonia2. Not all the minor rendering glitches seen in this mod have been fixed for this release (we can't delay the release any further) but the remainder of which will be addressed for beta7.

[esselfortium]

Grazza said:

Yes, but for other people who might be reading this thread who don't want mlook, it is useful info. It isn't at all obvious how to use Zdoom without mouse move or mlook.

BTW, in the past I always found Legacy a lot more stable than Zdoom. Can't say much about that ATM, as I don't use either very much. (And as for compatibility, Legacy changes a lot less of the original behaviour than Zdoom does, of course. But this probably isn't the place or time for a discussion of that.)

Despite the fact that both ZDoom and Legacy make some notable changes to behavior, for Boom compatibility I would think that in most cases (not all) ZDoom's support would be higher than Legacy's, especially for things such as voodoo doll scripting which Legacy (I'm not counting unfinished releases) doesn't support at all.

[Vermil]

It's a difficult thing to judge. Both port's deviate from the original games behaviour in some notable ways.

Legacy lacks Vodoo dolls for instance. No need to say anything more about that.

ZDoom appears to have altered player movement in some ways for instance, as using PL2 Map29 as an example, the player can simply run up the steps in ZDoom, while in Doom95 and Legacy, you have to strafe run to get up them.

[esselfortium]

Vermil said:

ZDoom appears to have altered player movement in some ways for instance, as using PL2 Map29 as an example, the player can simply run up the steps in ZDoom, while in Doom95 and Legacy, you have to strafe run to get up them.

I believe this is a result of ZDoom's added air control, which allows you to jump up onto a ledge without needing to be already moving forwards. Enter sv_aircontrol 0, or some such similar thing, in the console and that should disable it AFAIK.

[myk]

rderosier said:
1. I was happy to see the one comment regarding Legacy not supporting
MAPINFO, since I did not know how to replace it as suggested.

God forbid we learn how to do something!

Had it been the MAPINFO, the issue would have been solved. As it is, it doesn't work for some unknown reason. That is not something to be happy about :p

[Quasar]

Just for the record, EE also has "novert" emulation, as of the previous version - it is available through the config file and console.