DOS ain't dead

Hexen II for DOS (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 27.04.2008, 01:04

> It can be a good example for CPU intensive DOS game.
> Hammer of Thyrion - it is a open source port of Hexen II which also
> supports DOS!
> http://uhexen2.sourceforge.net/

It shouldn't (in theory) be hard to port to DOS since it uses the Quake engine (originally compiled for DOS via DJGPP 2.00 beta 3). However, I did try recompiling Quake recently, and it's hard to find out for sure how to do it (defunct websites, lack of interest among DOSers, etc). Apparently, it used a different sbrk() than is now default with current DJGPP 2.x, so you have to fiddle with it. (Won't run at all under XP, but both original and recompile seem to work in DOSBox 0.72 albeit without sound for whatever reason, maybe I configured it wrong, dunno). The DJGPP "near_ptr" stuff (and other stuff: CWSDPR0) are directly due to this game port. They (id, DJGPP) swapped a few coders so they could all work it out. See here for some details.

They wanted it to (also) work on Win95, which at the time had a few (DPMI?) bugs. Also, for later games, they more or less abandoned DOS ports because they wanted to use OpenGL, WinNT compatibility, etc. The only real reason they used DJGPP in the first place was because it was free and cross-compilable-friendly, and they wanted modders to be able to recompile with a free compiler to be (potentially) shipped (although they eventually used Quake C for that instead). Even in the GPL release of the source, they say, "You can probably recompile for DOS, but we haven't tried." Kinda sad, really (IMHO).

Here's as close as I got to compiling Quake. It seems to work, but I'm no pro (and info is hard to find on such an "old" game for an "old" OS. I did search news://comp.os.msdos.djgpp (via Google Groups) for a long, long time though, so hopefully it'll save somebody the trouble.

http://rugxulo.googlepages.com/quakemak.txt

P.S. As already mentioned by Marco, you pretty much need an Intel Pentium 1 or newer to run it because of .ASM optimizations by Michael Abrash utilizing the pipelined FPU (i.e., Cyrix was too slow, and although I don't have one, no searches of mine showed any effort by anyone to fix that issue).

> The original datafiles are requiered but you can find it pretty easily as
> Hexen II is now considered as abandonware.
> Try f.e. http://www.invalid.invalid/

Here's some useful links (though I haven't tested any of these downloads):

http://www.ravensoft.com/GamesDetail/tabid/76/XMID/13/Default.aspx
http://www.raven-games.com/essential.php#hx2
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/hexen2/ (okay, redundant but anyways ...)
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/

P.S. Use UNIVBE (or similar) for VESA 2 if your card doesn't support it.

EDIT by rr: removed abandonware URL

Complete thread:

• Hexen II for DOS - Laaca, 26.04.2008, 21:35 (Announce)
  • Hexen II for DOS - Rugxulo, 27.04.2008, 01:04
  • Hexen II for DOS - marcov, 27.04.2008, 15:45