ZDoom

[Lordmonkus]

I really have no idea if this is the right sub forum for this or not but I am putting it in here anyways. It's not really emulation and it's not DOSBox either but here it is.

I was messing around with ZDoom and its mini front end and decided I was going to figure out how to launch the games through Launchbox. For those of you who don't know what ZDoom is, it is:

" ZDoom is a Doom source port, originally based on ATB Doom and NTDOOM, that was first released in 1998. It has since added full support for all commonly-used Boom additions, Heretic, Hexen: Beyond Heretic, Strife: Quest for the Sigil, and Chex Quest. Many features have been added to ZDoom over time, including slopes, uncapped framerate, and z-clipping. The ZDoom source code is maintained by Randy Heit and Graf Zahl. The most recent official version is 2.8.1, released in 2016. The large number of features supported by ZDoom has made it the source port of choice for several independent game projects, notably Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl, Chex Quest 3, Foreverhood, and Harmony. "

Basically it's way to run all your Doom and Doom engine wad files with some graphical enhancements and in Windows easily. It has it's own mini front end that you load and then you pick the wad file you want to load from there.

Anyways, it was actually quite easy to get it working through Launchbox.

First setup a new emulator and point it to the ZDoom.exe. Then pick a platform you will be using for all these games, I chose Doom as mine. Next go into the associated platforms window and for default command line parameters enter

-iwad

Now import your wad files to the platform you chose (Doom for me) and scrape as MS-DOS.

Now you are done, just run your game and it will load.

[orac31]

Thanks for this but can you help me I have a lot of doom wads and want to put them in a directory I can put in main dir and they work the ini says

 

# These are the directories to automatically search for IWADs.
# Each directory should be on a separate line, preceded by Path=
[IWADSearch.Directories]
Path=.
Path=$DOOMWADDIR
Path=$HOME
Path=$PROGDIR

 

I made a dir called doomwaddir put it in the zdoom folder but it cant find the wads

what does the$ mean?

 

thanks

[Lordmonkus]

I think all of that  is just places the ZDoom UI looks for wad files if you are loading through their UI.

But I think if you put your wad files in another folder separate from ZDoom sort of like a roms folder it will still load through Launchbox just fine. I had my wad files just in the ZDoom folder where the zdoom.exe was but as a test I moved them out and repointed Launchbox to them and they work just fine.

[orac31]

thanks I give it a try later better then playing doom threw dosbox

[Lordmonkus]

I'm doing some experimenting with stuff. I have ZDoom and Zandronum which was meant to be more for multiplayer but it seems to have some extra graphical features like lighting and texture enhancements to make Doom look just a little better without going too crazy.

[airbikecop]

Good info!

I think something similar would work for Chocolate Doom - which is much closer to the original game as it doesn't have any fancy features.

[Lordmonkus]

Yup, it would work for most of the Doom source ports.

Right now I am trying to figure out a simple way of doing it for Doomsday but sadly I don't see a way as simple as this for it. It seems to be using a set of "split" command line switches to call a game and wad files. Sort of like how Daphne does for Dragon's Lair.

[Lordmonkus]

Ok I just figured out a relatively simple way to use Doomsday if you like it for all the extra fancy features it has.

First you need to install and setup doomsday.

Second, add the doomsday.exe to your emulators list which is located in the \Doomsday\bin\ folder.

Third add your wad files if you haven't done so already.

Fourth, for each game you will need to Edit and go to the "emulation" tab and at the bottom check Use Custom Command-Line Parameter. You now need to add the parameter

-game doom1 -iwad

You will need to do this for each game that you have and Doomsday supports but you will need to edit the "doom1" part to be for the specific game. so for Doom 2
 it would be:

-game doom2 -iwad

If you are unsure of the exact name you need to pass through open up your Doomsday window and for each game you can go to tools > preview command line or alt + c to open the window and you will see a -game line, just use that.

[8Phantasm]

I really like Zandronum 3.0. It's suppose to have the better mod-compatibility of ZDoom compared to Zandronum 2.1.2.
It's an alpha or beta download but it seemed to work fine. Not sure when the stable version will be out.

What I would really like to do is extract certain things from the BrutalDOOM mod that I like without changing the gameplay like the mod does.
I imagine it's a bit annoying to figure out which things in the mod file are what.

Edited August 21, 2016 by 8Phantasm

[Lordmonkus]

There's a bunch of different Doom source ports out there that's for sure and Zandronum is very good as well.

[master333]

I use GZDoom and I have so many different versions and mods I like to run.

I setup Launchbox by using application path as:

D:\GZDoom\Startup.bat

Startup.bat has:

@echo off
start d:\gzdoom

 

What this does is it opens my GZDoom folder so I can then choose what I want. 

[8Phantasm]

This looks awesome: