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GZdoom 1503 on win 98 Issues?

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I downloaded GZdoom 1503 to play a demo on COD.Wad.

GZdoom won't even start on my system. GZdoom 1500 runs just fine. I even copied my zdoom-xxx.ini over from 1500 and it won't work either.

Wondered if there is anything I missed on it or if anyone else is having a similar problem with GZdoom 1503 on win 98?

Here is my command line.... but GZdoom won't even start on regular doom 2 let alone running this demo.

D:\DOOM2\GZDoom1503\gzdoom.exe -File cod.wad codlev.wad cod-zd.pk3 -timedemo cod095114

I want to run in software mode because of my crappy video card. I have never had a problem running gzdoom before.

Ideas? Thoughts??



Edit:
Here is the error:
Error Starting Program...
missing shell32.dll:SHGetFolderPathA.

Shell32.dll does exist. I even dropped one in the folder with gzdooom1503

It also gives me another warning:

"A device attached to the system is not functioning"

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It's how GZDOOM deals with pathnames. It'll have to be a special build for win98, most likely. The Eternity Engine has two versions to get around this specific issue.

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Csonicgo said:

It's how GZDOOM deals with pathnames. It'll have to be a special build for win98, most likely. The Eternity Engine has two versions to get around this specific issue.

Doesn't matter if you even call these functions in some cases; there is stub code in the VC2008 crt0 that loads these function addresses even when they're not used.

Some people have accused MS of adding this crap just to kill 9x (and in some cases NT4 and Win2k) compatibility intentionally and not for any technical necessity. I think they just don't really give a shit, as usual ;)

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I watched that demo, so it runs on my Windows 98 system, which uses KernelEx. You may need to install that.

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Quasar said:

I think they just don't really give a shit, as usual ;)



Of course they don't. Why should they? Most software developed today won't run on these old OSs anyway and it's only cost money to keep any kind of support for them alive.

And regardless of what happens here, I don't really care either whether GZDoom will continue to work with pre-NT versions of Windows. Nobody should really use them anymore, except maybe on a secondary system used to run old software.

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Thanks myk grabbing it now. Some sort of possible solution is sure better than none.

Graf Zahl said:

....

And regardless of what happens here, I don't really care either whether GZDoom will continue to work with pre-NT versions of Windows. Nobody should really use them anymore, except maybe on a secondary system used to run old software.


Maybe a secondary system to run an old as hell game called doom or something? Great solution BTW. Just can't be bothered with it. Cool.

Edit:
As I mentioned above:
GZdoom 1500 runs just fine on my system. Is it not the same base as 1503?

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Searcher said:

Maybe a secondary system to run an old as hell game called doom or something? Great solution BTW. Just can't be bothered with it. Cool.

I think you will find that Doom, you know, the original executable? yeah, works great on Windows 98.

Going out of ones way to make sure that new software runs on old as shit operating systems sounds like a pointless pain in the ass, and I find it amusing that you have a problem with Graf simply not caring about 9x.

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Guest DILDOMASTER666
Mike.Reiner said:

I think you will find that Doom, you know, the original executable? yeah, works great on Windows 98.

Going out of ones way to make sure that new software runs on old as shit operating systems sounds like a pointless pain in the ass, and I find it amusing that you have a problem with Graf simply not caring about 9x.


Yeah, 3D floors and dynamic lights totally work in doom.exe

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If you run on an OS that has been obsolete for almost 10 years you really don't deserve better.

Besides, if you got a decent system, running 9x on it is just stupid and running an OpenGL port on a system designed for 9x sounds a bit pointless to me.

How many people are using something that old anyway? Far, far less than 0.1% would be my guess. That's just not worth putting real work in. As long as it works without any additional effort, fine. If not, well, pity, but not really worth bothering. I'd rather do things of use for the other 99.9%.

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Fisk said:

Yeah, 3D floors and dynamic lights totally work in doom.exe

Right, and somebody who wants to use software mode only cares about dynamic lights and 3d floors.

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Then I guess they would try ZDoom instead? If you don't want the OpenGL features, the only reason I'd see for preferring GZDoom over ZDoom is its FraggleScript support. Assuming there are good Legacy mods out there which use FS but not 3D floors.

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Mike.Reiner said:
Going out of ones way to make sure that new software runs on old as shit operating systems sounds like a pointless pain in the ass,

Maybe he likes using it, has no need to buy a newer computer, and just wants to watch a (rare) demo that requires GZDoom?

Add that to the fact that using a newer system makes the old ass stuff one likes to use harder to use, as it often fails or you have to install emulation or virtualization software (which may itself not be entirely satisfactory.)

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myk said:

Maybe he likes using it, has no need to buy a newer computer,



Somebody doing that should not complain that after 10 years new software tends to become non-operational.

Consider yourself lucky that the API Microsoft defined more than 15 years ago was good enough to survive this long. Other OSs have gone through several incompatible iterations during that time.

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Graf Zahl said:

Of course they don't. Why should they? Most software developed today won't run on these old OSs anyway and it's only cost money to keep any kind of support for them alive.

And regardless of what happens here, I don't really care either whether GZDoom will continue to work with pre-NT versions of Windows. Nobody should really use them anymore, except maybe on a secondary system used to run old software.

Well because actually it'd probably take 5 minutes to run a VC2008 program on Win98 and say "woops if we force-import this function it needlessly kills compatibility with a swath of older versions. It would take us all of 5 minutes to change this, if we weren't lazy as all hell."

As a programmer I know such things are not *just* a matter of funding or cost, but basic choices made while working on the code.

The real fact of the matter is creating "upgrade incentive," IMHO. The more programs don't work on older versions, the more they feel people will be compelled to upgrade. For older PC's that cannot handle Vista or 7, XP is still the best choice as far as Microsoft OSes go - but just wait til programs stop supporting it because they import a new shell32.dll export that the program never even uses, or something ignorant and asinine like that, and we'll see major complaints.

It'd be one thing if it were something you could control by changing the libraries your program is linked with. But designing the compiler to drag in all this shit when it's not even used is actually extremely poor and lazy design. For decades people have been honing compilers so that they're able to *remove* unused code. Now they intentionally bring in garbage for no perceivable reason. Blah, I say.

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If you do not want to install KernelEx, As GZDoom does not uses SHELL32.DLL:SHGetFolderPathA, Then you can replace it by any other shell32.dll function you like as ShellExecuteA for exemple.
To do this, You need e Hex editor like Cygnus, Vi, HXD, WinHex, etc...
Then go to ofset 30F0E8h and replace the ASCII
SHGetFolderPathA by ShellExecuteA AND put at least one 00 as HEX at the end of the new string ie: after the 'A'. Be shure to be in overstrike mode.
If you use a VooDoo, The GL mode may work with an alternate Opengl32.dll see: http://www.falconfly.de/mesafx.htm (I use MesaFX
V0.6.2.0.2) Put The DLL file in GZDoom directory. Do not replase your System one with it.

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Graf Zahl said:

If you run on an OS that has been obsolete for almost 10 years you really don't deserve better


I don't usually agree with Graf but motherfucking this. Windows XP, at almost an entire decade old, is the oldest version of Windows that's acceptable to use, and the only reason it's acceptable is because there was such a huge gulf of time between XP and Vista, and that Vista was panned. Using anything older is at this point pretty ridiculous and really if you want to use something so obsolete then you should simply deal with the fact that most software is going to shit itself trying to run on such an ancient and outdated OS.

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John Smith said:

I don't usually agree with Graf but motherfucking this. Windows XP, at almost an entire decade old, is the oldest version of Windows that's acceptable to use, and the only reason it's acceptable is because there was such a huge gulf of time between XP and Vista, and that Vista was panned. Using anything older is at this point pretty ridiculous and really if you want to use something so obsolete then you should simply deal with the fact that most software is going to shit itself trying to run on such an ancient and outdated OS.

While I ordinarily agree, it should be for a meaningful and difficult-to-avoid reason that software shits itself on different platforms. I don't think that MS hard-coding DLL imports into their crt0 just to save their programmers from writing a "get folder" routine is a justified reason to break backward compatibility. It's shitty.

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Graf Zahl said:
Somebody doing that should not complain that after 10 years new software tends to become non-operational.

Yeah, I don't mind too much that you don't retain active support for Windows 98, or at least see where you're coming from. I think I misinterpreted Mike.Reiner's post, since I read it as saying that a user going out of his way to make newer software works on his older system was wasting his time.

Although, if it's easy to fix, as Quasar implies, then I see little reason to avoid adding a fix once user input comes in requesting it.

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myk said:

Maybe he likes using it, has no need to buy a newer computer, and just wants to watch a (rare) demo that requires GZDoom?

myk said:

I think I misinterpreted Mike.Reiner's post, since I read it as saying that a user going out of his way to make newer software works on his older system was wasting his time.

Indeed, I have no problem if the user wants to at least try, but the developer shouldn't have to go out of their way for old platforms.

myk said:

Although, if it's easy to fix, as Quasar implies, then I see little reason to avoid adding a fix once user input comes in requesting it.

If it's truly something trivial, then I agree, but anything major? a waste of time.

myk said:

Add that to the fact that using a newer system makes the old ass stuff one likes to use harder to use, as it often fails or you have to install emulation or virtualization software (which may itself not be entirely satisfactory.)


To which I think a secondary system running Windows 98se is perfect for. Unless space is such a huge issue, I don't see why somebody couldn't get a newer PC and keep the old one around..

..or in the case of my old PC, have a dual boot between XP and Windows 98..

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Quasar said:

While I ordinarily agree, it should be for a meaningful and difficult-to-avoid reason that software shits itself on different platforms. I don't think that MS hard-coding DLL imports into their crt0 just to save their programmers from writing a "get folder" routine is a justified reason to break backward compatibility. It's shitty.



To you, maybe. But you have to accept the fact that MS no longer supports these old OSs and you can't expect them to bend over backwards to accomodate a handful of people. To them Win9x is just an old relic better to be forgotten.

I guess their developers didn't even think of such implications when doing it.

myk said:

Although, if it's easy to fix, as Quasar implies, then I see little reason to avoid adding a fix once user input comes in requesting it.



Correction: I wouldn't mind adding such a fix if someone comes submitting it. Don't forget: I don't use Win9x, in fact I haven't been using it for 8 years - and I really see no point looking up what needs to be done to fix any broken support. And of course I can't test such code.

This goes in particular to GZDoom. To be honest, almost any graphics card that was already in existence when Win9x started to fade out of common use and for which drivers still exist is old enough to be considered unsupported by GZDoom.

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Graf Zahl said:

This goes in particular to GZDoom. To be honest, almost any graphics card that was already in existence when Win9x started to fade out of common use and for which drivers still exist is old enough to be considered unsupported by GZDoom.

Win98 has official drivers for Radeon9600 and Geforce 6x that can run DOOM3 smoothly!
And GZDoom is smooth with a VooDoo III.

I realy do not see why people Would update to XP which is slow as hell even on a pentium pro compared to win95/98/ME, considering that it does not offer you anything system speaking if all your hardwre is supported by Win9x and you have a single core.
XP does not even allow you to have larger disk than 2TB which is the Win95 osr2.x+ limitation with MS-DOS compatibility mode or LBA48 patch.

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XP does offer something, though: a stable kernel. You can't cause a BSOD with an application with XP or newer OS, you have to fuck up at the driver level for that.

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Ramon_Demestre said:

updat to XP whis is slow as hell even on a pentium pro compared to win95/98/ME,



XP was never 'slow as hell' for me. Of course I never used it on an underpowered system with insufficient RAM.

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Fisk said:

Yeah, 3D floors and dynamic lights totally work in doom.exe

Yes, they do. Use Quake 2 for that, it works in Windows 98.

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Graf Zahl said:

XP was never 'slow as hell' for me. Of course I never used it on an underpowered system with insufficient RAM.

XP is slow as hell as soon as it hits the swap file, so yeah, you better have a shitload of RAM. Though considering Win98 starts freaking out above 512 MB IIRC, it's unlikely any motherboards of its era support more than that, and 512 MB was *not enough* for XP on my AMD box. Terrible performance on that thing if Firefox went over the 200 MB line. A couple times it became so unusable, behaving much like Win3.1 when it would run low on resources (stuff disappearing, constant warning dialogs popping up, unresponsive to input going as far as to start blooping the PC speaker at me in anger), I had to cold reboot it.

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My old XP system only had 512MB and I never had any real problems with it - except for those applications where I clearly needed more.

Firefox hitting 200MB? I had it go up to 70 or 80 but never to 200...

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Ramon_Demestre said:

I realy do not see why people Would update to XP

How about the fact that if you so much as sneeze on your 9x system it BSoDs? If a program so much as freezes in 9x, it's damn near impossible to close it without killing the whole OS.

As for the whole XP being slow as hell thing, I never had a problem with 512 megs of ram, but, of course, by 2005 I had moved on to a gig, and I believe in the following years Firefox became rather bloated.

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98 vs XP? Have I woken up ten years ago?

I for one will NEVER upgrade to XP because it forces you to activate it. Isn't that insane?

lol

XP always ran great for me on 512mb. Good for playing Battlefield Vietnam and San Andreas. Windows 98 should die and go to hell, if you use that OS you don't deserve GZdoom

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Graf Zahl said:

Firefox hitting 200MB? I had it go up to 70 or 80 but never to 200...


If you only surf AJAX-free, 1996 websites and only keep one tab open with no addons or extensions running, then maybe. Maybe.

Otherwise, it skyrockets very easily (although opening e.g. 20 tabs does not proportionately increase the amount of memory consumed).

And it's not just FF either: pretty much every modern browser is VERY memory hungry due to all those plugins and AJAX apps. Ever tried to play a shit-simple facebook game? They make RAM usage skyrocket, for a degree of interactivity that even a PC-XT could provide.

If you want something lightweight you must only use IE6 or Konqueror.

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