Ports

[ProGamerX56]

Ok, i need a souce port that will let me add no monsters or turbo and let me record my shtty runs (improving). Do i need to get a source port? Or can i reassign my doomit executable from ml to ultimate. Are chocolate doom and prboom self installing or do i have to spend two hours manually exracing files (dosbox)

[Gez]

Why would you need to spend two hours extracting files?

The Chocolate Doom package is under 700kb, it contains two exes (game and setup) and three DLLs, plus a few text files you don't need to extract. That's extracted in a matter of seconds even on old hardware.

Also, the point of source ports is that they're ports. They don't run in DOSBox, that's for vanilla. Ports run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc. The same system that you run DOSBox in...

The only thing that may need to be extracted inside DOSBox is the IWAD through the official installer (deice stuff), and that's not needed since you're already playing the game, which means you already have the IWAD extracted somewhere.

[ProGamerX56]

I was exaggerating.
Steam setup the game automatically, but yes I have the applicable Iwads. So it is one click installation, so once I've set it up, will it run when I press start on steam, or just when I run the port exe. Oh and is this possible with no source ports, ideally I want to stick with the Doom executable.

[Gez]

If you have the game from Steam, then you can just extract Chocolate Doom somewhere, and click its executable. It'll find the IWAD automatically when looking for them in the Steam install path. (Other ports do that too, including Eternity and ZDoom/GZDoom; but for demo recording you're probably better off staying with Chocolate Doom.)

The ports don't need to mess up with Windows' registry, set up environment variables, or do anything else that would warrant using an installer. Extract and run.

[ProGamerX56]

Thanks!!! I assume PrBoom is the same...

[fabian]

ProGamerX56 said:

Thanks!!! I assume PrBoom is the same...

Nope, prboom-plus does not recognize steam installations, yet.

[Gez]

And I'm not sure Steam even existed the last time PrBoom-not-plus was updated. I think it happened before the Internet was invented.

[Quasar]

Gez said:

I think it happened before the Internet was invented.

Not quite, but it *was* before it was upgraded into a series of tubes.

[ProGamerX56]

Got Chocolate Doom, and runs like a charm on the Doom.wad. No setup needed, started in a few seconds.

[wesleyjohnson]

Most Doom ports do not install in the way that the typical Windows user has come to expect from every program. That still is unique to Windows and its native programs. Even an install on Linux is closer to DOS than to what Windows does.

Most Doom ports still use the same setup method used since DOS.
Unpack (as in unzip a zip file) to a directory. You get to find the unzip tool yourself.

Upon running the Doom port it will search for the resources it needs (the wad files (IWAD and PWAD), some port specific resource files, config files, and some library resources). If it cannot find them, it will tell you. Then you can move things into the executing directory to make them easier to find, or you can invoke the program with specific file references using command line switches.

There are also some environment vars that can point to important resources (like DOOMWADDIR), that can make usage easier.
Those should be mentioned in the docs.

If you cannot deal with command line switches, then there are Launcher programs that will allow starting without using a command line window.
For most ports you still need to know the switches, so read the docs.

On Linux the only difference is that if you want to make the Doom game available to all users, it can be moved to one of the system game directories and given permissions that allow all users to run it.