Adding the missing part of DoomNew – audio

Posted on April 15, 2024 by neozeed

DoomNew, is a rather ambitious project by Maraakate, to attempt to revert the old linuxdoom-1.10 to something more akin to what shipped for DooM 1.9 using Hexen/Heretic source code to fill in many of the blanks in a very Jurassic Park like manipulation of it’s DNA (source code). It’s great and gives you a very cool MS-DOS based engine using the original Watcom tools. But there is always the one catch, which is that it relies on the original sound library, DMX.

And unfortunately, nobody has been able to get ahold of Paul Radek to see if he’d be okay with any kind of open-source license. So, sadly DMX has been a long-standing stumbling block for that ‘authentic’ super vanilla DOS DooM.

Enter the Raptor

Fast forward to a few days ago, and I come across dosraptor on github. I had a copy of this back in the day, it was bundled on CD-ROM or something. I am absolutely terrible at games like this, but I did remember this one being incredibly fluid, and fun despite me having no skill. Raptor was written by Scott Host, and it’s still on sale over on steam! The source had been cleaned up with help from skynettx, nukeykt and NY00123.

I went ahead and built it from source, and in no time I was up and running. I found Watcom 9.5 was the best path to go with. I even made a ‘release‘ for those who don’t want the joy of building from source, and of course picked up a copy on both steam and his site. While building the source code, and looking at the directory tree that’s when I noticed apodmx:

This is a DMX sound library wrapper, which is powered by the
Apogee Sound System, the latter being written by Jim Dose for
3D Realms. When used together, they form a replacement for DMX.

The DMX wrapper was written by Nuke.YKT for PCDoom, a DOS port
of id Software's Doom title from the 90s.

It also includes the mus2mid converter, contributed by Ben Ryves for
Simon Howard's Chocolate Doom port, as well as the PC Speaker frequency table, dumped by Gez from a DOOM2.EXE file and later also added to Chocolate Doom.

A few years later, this wrapper was modified by NY00123; Mostly to be built as a standalone library, while removing dependencies on game code.

So it turns out that Raptor used DMX, just like DooM!

Well, isn’t that incredible!

Now the first question I had, was apodmx a direct drop-in replacement for DMX? Well basically, yes! Let’s check out the Adlib driver!

DooM 1.9 intro

NewDoom intro

As you can hear, the intro is very different. But it’s playing at least. Ok how about E1M1?

DooM 1.9 E1M1

NewDoom E1M1

The Apogee Sound System is softer, and not quite the same as DMX, but compared to nothing I’m more than happy with it. The AdLib is kind of a weird card to drive, and I guess it’s not to surprising that there is such a variance.

How about a Roland Sound Canvas?

Sadly, mine is inaccessible, but thanks to nukeykt there is the Nuked-SC55: Roland SC-55 series emulation. I had to setup the MidiLoop as expected, and configure DosBox for the Loop and now I have a virtual Sound Canvas. So let’s see how the two engines deal with a common instrument!

DooM 1.9 Sound Canvas 55

NewDoom Sound Canvas 55

Pretty cool, if I do say so myself.

I’ve uploaded my modifications to github, along with a copy of that old ZeeDooM I had slapped together ages ago. I’d taken the map source code from Romero, and the graphical/audio resources from Freedoom and slapped them together.

Both Johns reunite for a 30th anniversary celebration of DooM!

Posted on December 10, 2023 by neozeed

I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but wow it’s been 30 years. I can remember having a really good GPA to basically being forced to drop out. I guess it’s just as well, DooM was great, even to the point of having to get good at building LANs, and building them for fun & profit.

DooM in DooM!

Posted on July 14, 2022 by neozeed

This is super cool, kgsws has managed to use some buffer overflows, and code injections to get DooM to load DooM, and display to a texture.

Watch the video for all the details!

You can download the source and assets from github

kgsws/doom-in-doom: Doom 2 code execution. With a Doom port. (github.com)

zeeDooM Xenix!

Posted on October 26, 2021 by neozeed

So a few months ago, gattilorenz had told me he managed to work out how to do direct video under Xenix, and was able to get DooM running! He made the source available, and I meant to do something back then, but I must have gotten distracted.

So I went ahead and added the zeeDooM thing I had been working on a while ago which is a combination of the John Romero released maps, and the FreeDoom assets. So it’s not 100% the released version, it just looks that way.

I’ve gone ahead and created a qemu disk image (if you convert it, it does run on VMware, so probably far more 386 capable emulators than I can imagine), along with an old Qemu exe for some stand alone fun on archive.org.

There is no sound, nor music. I should look closer one day, and see if I can drive some direct music to an Adlib since it’s just IO ports, and maybe grab all the direct sound code from viti95’s FastDoom?

Anyways, it’s zeeDooM!.. on Xenix!

Amongst all the DooM and gloom, DooM 64 was released for PC!

Posted on March 24, 2020 by neozeed

I guess I missed all the excitement of the new DooM whatever, but Bethesda decided to dig up that N64 ‘DooM 3’ aka DooM 64. It’s a unique game unlike all the other console ports that were straight ports of the original DooM, although some like the 32x (Mars) or Jaguar versions that had a bunch of details removed from the levels to either spare the limited processors, and/or save precious cartridge space.

At $39 HKD, it’s $4 USD, so it’s a bit ‘pricy’ for something that is a 23 year old game, but at least I guess it’s out in the wild in a legal format. No idea if it made it to Bethesda.net as that whole thing collapsed quicker than Fallout 76 became a meme riddled disappointment.

Anyways I know I’m late to the party, but it’s all new to me.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1148590

How much DooM is there in the Doom 3: BFG Edition version?

Posted on November 30, 2019 by neozeed

Another follow up to my ages old “Just how â€˜originalâ€™ is the Ultimate Doom on steam?“, I thought I’d follow up with the DooM 3 BFG version.

I already have DooM 3, but this is apparently remastered, and includes the previous versions!?

It’s not like it really offers anything I don’t have, but it’s on sale so whatever let’s go.

And in the base/wads directory there they are!

fb35c4a5a9fd49ec29ab6e900572c524 DOOM.WAD
c3bea40570c23e511a7ed3ebcd9865f7 DOOM2.WAD

And sure enough the are the latest versions of the game files to be found according to doom.fandom.com. Great! So to further the abuse I tried them under my mutilated DooM.

Ultimate Doom seems to work just fine on it’s own I tested it briefly warping to a few levels but yeah it just works! Doom2 however bombs out that the resource TITLEPIC is missing from the wad. How disappointing!

Naturally I just took the easy way out, and basically checked for the resource, and load another if it’s missing.

@@ -477,7 +477,11 @@
  else
  pagetic = 170;
  gamestate = GS_DEMOSCREEN;
- pagename = "TITLEPIC";
+ /* the Doom 3 BFG EDITION version of Doom 2 is lacking the titlepic */
+ if(W_CheckNumForName("TITLEPIC")>0)
+ pagename = "TITLEPIC";
+ else
+ pagename = "DMENUPIC";
  if ( gamemode == commercial )
  S_StartMusic(mus_dm2ttl);
  else

It’s a shamefully basic patch. But it works.

Another interesting thing is that DooM 3 BFG also includes the gravis ultrasound bank data, so you could load them up into some other emulator and enjoy that gravis experience. I don’t know if it’s licensed or what, but it’s a nice touch.

AVGN reviews Chex Quest

Posted on August 23, 2019 by neozeed

Okay that was funny. I never thought of even trying Brutal DooM + Chex Quest. Sounds awesome.

Although I’d played a little with Chex Quest before, I never tried it on the DooM source. Oddly enough it’s Ultimate DooM. In d_main.c you can do some simple test for chex.wad and pass it off as the ‘retail’ version.

	if ( !access (chex,R_OK) )
	{
		gamemode = retail;
		D_AddFile (chex);
		return;
	}

Or you can simply just rename chex.wad to doom.wad or doomu.wad. Many of the strings for DooM are compiled into the EXE, not taken from the WAD file (although it could have been, I guess it was to prevent people from making overtly cheeky mods?).

So firing up the wad under my crappy DooM port thing to MS-DOS (for the sane people just use some other Win64/OSX/Linux thing like zdoom), and when selecting an episode you’ll see the Ultimate DooM levels.

Wait? What? I though Chex Quest was a ‘total conversion’ WAD. Well it turns out that it is, and it isn’t. They replaced a lot of the default stuff from a retail version of Ultimate DooM. And what they didn’t replace, well it’s still there. And yes that does mean everything outside of the first 5 levels are the original DooM levels. And that includes the music as well!

Well isn’t that surprising! And yes that means that it’s possible to just replace the first 5 levels with the default DooM levels and have that reverse conversion. In the same way the menu screens are very Chexy too:

It certainly gives that kid like feeling to it. Although the replacement Barrons of Hell are a little too big so they do look kind of silly.

So as always I’m late to the party. I’m sure someone out there didn’t have the retail version of DooM and instead used Chex Quest for those LAN games. Although it does detect that the WAD has been modified so I don’t think it would just be all that fine.

Not that finding the original WAD files, or source to the maps, and just compiling them yourself is all that difficult, but I guess it is something else to load up.

Bethesda DooM for the PC

Posted on July 28, 2019 by neozeed

With all the excitement regarding the DRM, disapearing Xbox versions and the terrible music in the Unity port, I thought I’d check out the PC version that is thankfully on sale on Bethesda.net. I really have lost track the number of times I’ve bought this game, but here we go again. The last time I went through this was back in 2014, with the aptly titled: “Just how â€˜originalâ€™ is the Ultimate Doom on steam?” story.

And much to my surprise they use the same version of DOSBox, 0.71, and have the same AdLib pre-config, along with the missing SETUP.EXE to allow you to change it.

HOWEVER, there is one big difference, the WAD file.

The steam version includes this wad file:

c4fe9fd920207691a9f493668e0a2083 doom.wad

Where the Bethesda.net uses this wad file:

e4f120eab6fb410a5b6e11c947832357 doom.wad

And looking on the DooM Wiki, that means that the wad file is from the PlayStation Network version.