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Doom 95: Yet more problems of mine...

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As everyone knows, Doom95 was a god-awful attempt by the money-obsessed Microsoft to port DOS Doom onto Microsoft Computers. It contained about fifty thousand new bugs and glitches and suffered from mouse support that didn't even work. But hey, at least it raised the visplane limit, so it's not all bad, right?

Since I used the Collector's Edition in the past I had no choice but to put up with it all until I got SkullTag.

The problem is, in order to spend no more money on getting a testing program for Vanilla-compatible Doom Builder maps, I've had to use it - and have been facing stupid bugs and crashes that don't occur on bigger maps made by other authors. -_-

No 1. On some of my maps, Doom95 crashes as soon as it starts with the message:


The instruction at <insert random number here> referenced memory at <insert another random number>
The memory could not be written

Click on OK to terminate the application


k thx 4 understanding!!!11!1!

No 2. On some of my maps, if they're complicated at all, HOMs appear inside some of the sectors, infinitely tall - but not on complicated maps by other authors. What the hell.

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Joe667 said:

The problem is, in order to spend no more money on getting a testing program for Vanilla-compatible Doom Builder maps, I've had to use it -

No you don't! Use Chocolate Doom and/or Chocorenderlimits instead, they're closer to vanilla than Doom95 and you shouldn't have any issues with mice.

Hard to tell what might be causing problem #2, could be missing textures. Are you attempting to load a texture wad along with your map?

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Joe667 said:

No 2. On some of my maps, if they're complicated at all, HOMs appear inside some of the sectors, infinitely tall. What the hell.


Can't tell much about why this is without seeing the map. However if you're mapping for vanilla you should take a look at Chocorenderlimits and the Visplane Explorer plugin for DB2. If you posted an example I'm sure someone could tell you what the problem is.

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GreyGhost said:

Are you attempting to load a texture wad along with your map?


Nope.

plums said:

Can't tell much about why this is without seeing the map.


Well, the main wad where it's glaringly obvious was in a hell-themed Acheron inspired map that's now sitting in the hardware of my old computer - which my Dad took away as a punishment. (I'm 12 years old, you see.)

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Joe667 said:

As everyone knows, Doom95 was a god-awful attempt by the money-obsessed Microsoft to port DOS Doom onto Microsoft Computers. It contained about fifty thousand new bugs and suffered from mouse support that didn't even work. But hey, at least it raised the visplane limit, so it's not all bad, right?


Well... I wouldn't go that far and say that Doom 95 was god awful lol It did have a few bugs. One of the bugs that I particularly remember from when I was a little kid was that sometimes when you opened a saved game, it randomly crashed.

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doomguy93 said:

One of the bugs that I particularly remember from when I was a little kid was that sometimes when you opened a saved game, it randomly crashed.


DeimosComasBlack on YouTube demonstrated in Doom95 on Map16: Suburbs how you can save your game while an Arch-vile is causing flames to erupt in front of you then load the game and voila, you now have a friendly "CRASHED" info box telling you stuff about memory referencing...

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plums said:

If you posted an example I'm sure someone could tell you what the problem is.


Well, I can show you an already made map - Map30 of 10sectors.wad on /idgames contains one near the start - head left first chance and go near the edge, and stand on the left. Then carefully look around... you should see it near the edge of the screen (I saw it on the left). And I saw it on Chocolate Doom (thanks for the suggestion), mind.

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Joe667 said:

Well, I can show you an already made map - Map30 of 10sectors.wad on /idgames contains one near the start - head left first chance and go near the edge, and stand on the left. Then carefully look around... you should see it near the edge of the screen (I saw it on the left). And I saw it on Chocolate Doom (thanks for the suggestion), mind.


Cool, thanks. There's just a few too many linedefs there - I think the FIREWALA circle is what's doing it, but in general there are quite a lot of 2s linedefs. Having open areas with even a medium amount of detail is just not something vanilla doom was really built to handle.

"Complexity" is a bad metric to measure Doom limits with, because you can have extremely complex/detailed areas, but if you keep them in small spaces you'll still sail under the visplane limits. Here though, because you can see so many different linedefs from the same point, you just barely get some HOM. It's not how complex a map is, but how much of that complexity you can see at once.

Doom also doesn't do any view-distance checks, so even if you've got a mess of linedefs so far away that it only takes up a pixel or two at 320x200, it can still cause problems.

Anyhow in this particular case, you could probably solve that HOM by reducing the number of linedefs for that FIREWALA pillar, maybe make it a simple diamond instead, and flattening some of those angled arches.

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Ledillman said:

As GreyGhost said, use ChocolateDoom instead dude.

I'll never understand why some people insist on causing themselves unnecessary hardship and pain for no discernable reason and ignore all contradictory advice.

Does Chocolate Doom not fit the use case for what you're doing? It's there some bug that means you're unable to use it? I'd like to know.

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fraggle said:

I'll never understand why some people insist on causing themselves unnecessary hardship and pain for no discernable reason and ignore all contradictory advice.

Does Chocolate Doom not fit the use case for what you're doing? It's there some bug that means you're unable to use it? I'd like to know.


He is using it now I think, based on his above comments. The other issue in this post is about VPOs/HOMs/etc.

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fraggle decided to be an asshole and said:

I'll never understand why some people insist on causing themselves unnecessary hardship and pain for no discernable reason and ignore all contradictory advice.

Does Chocolate Doom not fit the use case for what you're doing? It's there some bug that means you're unable to use it? I'd like to know.


Well, back when I was still using Doom95, I only used it because I had a fairly old, slightly crap computer with Windows XP on it. I've no idea why, but both Chocolate and Vanilla Doom didn't work for me then.

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You must have done something wrong for Chocolate Doom to not run under XP (which I'm using now), though vanilla Doom does have issues and is best run in DOSBox. Doom95 doesn't seem to be happy on anything newer than Windows Me though there's a mouse patch for XP/Vista/Win7 which helps, not sure if it's been tested with Windows 8.

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Avoozl said:

I seem to recall a display issue whilst running Doom95 on Windows 7.


I recently tried running Doom 95 on Windows 7 and it gives me problems too.

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Yes. Sometimes, the colour palette completely fucks itself up, until something happens to change the gamma (e.g. picking up an item, getting a powerup) at which point one or two colours go back to normal but most stay on drug-trip mode.

Other times, it's fine.

But this bug also happens in Vanilla Doom - if you watch the Doom episode of Steam roulette, you'll see they experience trouble with the colours.

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GreyGhost said:

...There's a mouse patch for XP/Vista/Win7...


I know, I had to use it when I had my old Windows XP computer in order to play SkullTag - and even then it only seemed to work on the Ultimate Doom.

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Joe667 said:

Yes. Sometimes, the colour palette completely fucks itself up, until something happens to change the gamma (e.g. picking up an item, getting a powerup) at which point one or two colours go back to normal but most stay on drug-trip mode.
Other times, it's fine.
But this bug also happens in Vanilla Doom - if you watch the Doom episode of Steam roulette, you'll see they experience trouble with the colours.


I also remember that during the years I played Doom 95, the invisible sprites (such as the player picking up the partial invisibility power up and the spectre demon) get kinda messed up in terms of color.

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doomguy93 said:

I also remember that during the years I played Doom 95, the invisible sprites (such as the player picking up the partial invisibility power up and the spectre demon) get kinda messed up in terms of color.


Not just in colour - they simply don't work. This is because the effect relies on some technical thing that XP etc. doesn't have. The Mouse Patch fixes this, too.

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Joe667 said:

Not just in colour - they simply don't work. This is because the effect relies on some technical thing that XP etc. doesn't have. The Mouse Patch fixes this, too.


I think the bug looks something like this:

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OK. But in mine they didn't just look messed up, they weren't invisible. They were black with random glitch pixel garbage covering them. :)

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Joe667 said:

OK. But in mine they didn't just look messed up, they weren't invisible. They were black with random glitch pixel garbage covering them. :)


Mine were black with random glitch pixel crap too lol but that was the closest picture I can find that resembled it though.

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There are very few variations in the video draw code. Most of it is drawing columns of pixels. It only uses OS functions to swap the buffer
to video memory.

Two special cases come to mind.
1. Drawing transparent sprites requires that the previous pixel value be read, used as an index in the transparent color map, the result being written back as the new pixel. It does not use any OS functions to do this, it is a plain read and write of the video buffer.
2. Windows platforms might use DirectDraw, which has its own rules for access to the video buffer. On DoomLegacy we do not allow direct access to the video buffer, writing to a screen buffer instead.
Doom95 might have tried direct access, and is getting reads to the video hardware returned as 0 instead (which is black). A transparent sprite on black, will still look very black.

If there is a double-buffer switch somewhere, turn it back on.
Transparent drawing to a second buffer in memory should work.
This is very likely video hardware dependent.

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The spectre effect is applicable on a per-column basis and quite literally it just reads pixels left and right from that column with a fixed semi-random pattern, and then renders them with a darker colormap. It also has the limitation of not being applied to the top and bottom rows of the screen -only the darkening is applied, not the fuzzing.

Of course you need full read access to the video buffer -or the equivalent in your system- for it to work as intended. If there's hardware with poor support for full reads and other APIs getting in the way though, then of course you're going to get nasty glitches. I wonder why they simply didn't render to main memory instead, if using acceleration was so problematic....was it that much of a performance hit?

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It's just really badly written DirectDraw code, period. It was the first "pilot" test program for DirectX, so I'd imagine they were working off half-finished documentation and using tons of stuff that was probably deprecated by the time DirectX 2 hit.

I know I've never had a machine where the partial invis effect looked correct in Doom 95.

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Does Doom 95 work with windows 7? For some reason it just doesn't work when I run it on my windows 7 pc, but it works fine on windows xp.

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Doom 95 on a modern PC is a bit hit and miss. On my Windows 7 x64 system using Beetlejuice's mouse fix I have it working properly. Other than not having some way of activating always run, it controls and plays just fine. Using the -emulate arg also keeps the fuzz effect looking correct. It is kind of cool playing an official build of Doom on a modern PC without Dosbox.

That said chocolate-doom is a much better choice for a faithful Doom setup without using Dosbox. It runs on just about anything with no hassle.

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Mike.Reiner said:

Doom 95 on a modern PC is a bit hit and miss. On my Windows 7 x64 system using Beetlejuice's mouse fix I have it working properly. Other than not having some way of activating always run, it controls and plays just fine. Using the -emulate arg also keeps the fuzz effect looking correct. It is kind of cool playing an official build of Doom on a modern PC without Dosbox.

That said chocolate-doom is a much better choice for a faithful Doom setup without using Dosbox. It runs on just about anything with no hassle.


I've never used the source port "chocolate-doom"
What makes it more unique then all the other source ports?

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Chocolate Doom is the port most accurate to the original DOS Doom's behavior. Almost every facet of the original game is emulated, and virtually all WADs created for vanilla Doom will work perfectly in Chocolate. Most other source ports add extra features that make them play slightly differently, and can cause incompatibilities with old maps, but that's not a problem with Chocolate. Chocolate Doom is also far more stable than Doom 95 ever was.

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