Struggling to run a really old Wolf3D-themed wad.

[SiFi270]

Namely this one. I discovered it when I saw it listed as one of the hilights of the Maximum Doom collection, and I don't think it's working. Many of the sprites seem to be completely invisible, most notably the FPVs for nearly every weapon.

I've had this problem while trying to run it in most source ports, from GZDoom to the original DOS version of Boom, but when I try to run it in Chocolate Doom it says "error parsing dehacked file", and when I tried to put all the files in my vanilla Doom 2 directory and running the .bat included, it says it can't find doom2.wad.

In short, I'm at a complete loss here, and I hope this wad isn't too obscure for anyone to know what I'm doing wrong.

[Vermil]

The Dehacked file is a v2.0 one.

I don't think there is any source port that supports versions of Dehacked other than v3.0.

[SiFi270]

So is it just a lost cause now, or can I still manage something by screwing around with Dosbox and my Steam copy of Doom 2?

[Gez]

I think you have to hunt down dehacked 2.0, apply the patch on a vanilla doom.exe, then fire up dehacked 3.0 to look at the patched exe and create a dehacked 3.0 patch from it, and then you can use that new patch with Boom, GZDoom, Choco, or pretty much anything else.

[Vermil]

Dehacked 2.0 might not work 100% with a 1.9 Doom2.exe (the version on Steam) and hence may require an earlier version of the exe.

The timestamp of this pwad suggests it may have been made for Doom2 1.7/a (the first official release of Doom2).

[GreyGhost]

Vermil said:

Dehacked 2.0 might not work 100% with a 1.9 Doom2.exe (the version on Steam) and hence may require an earlier version of the exe.

Since old version of doom2.exe don't exactly grow on trees, I've created a couple of binary patches to downgrade version 1.9 to 1.666 or 1.7 using bspatch.exe (supplied with the patches), which runs from a command prompt but its syntax is straightforward.

bspatch oldfile newfile patchfile - where oldfile is Doom2.exe v1.9, newfile is the downgrade executable you're creating (don't give it the same name and path as oldfile) and patchfile is one of the supplied patches.

@SiFi270 - Before starting, generate a CRC or MD5 checksum for your doom2.exe and compare it with those in the Wiki, since anything other than an unmodified v1.9 executable will probably result in bspatch outputting garbage. Wouldn't hurt to generate and compare the checksum of your downgraded doom2.exe before doing as Gez suggested a couple of posts back, it's tedious but works. You can grab a copy of DeHackEd 2 from the archive.