I just recently picked up the “Doom Classic Complete” collection for less than $5 and I came across something I thought I’d share. First of all, this collection contains Ultimate and Final Doom, Doom II, and the Master Levels for Doom II. I recently re-discovered a CD I have for Ultimate Doom, but the game wouldn’t run the way I wanted it to. However, I made a discovery then and ran into the issue again with my recent purchase of this collection, so I thought I’d share my tip.
As a PC gamer, I’ve gotten used to playing games with a keyboard and a mouse. WASD keys move forward, left, back, and right. The mouse looks up, down, left, and right. I can’t recall how I played the Doom games back in the 90’s, but it certainly feels odd now. This is because moving the mouse forward or backward will move your character in that direction. I found this to be quite odd and annoying. I did some digging online and I found a few different solutions. Some weren’t helping, the game would still lock up and such, but I found another, perhaps easier, solution.
This Steam version of the collection uses DOSBox and I have played around with it a bit starting a few weeks ago. Sure, if you load a separate instance of DOSBox, mount your Doom directory and run “novert.com” (a file you can download for free on the Internet) before “doom.exe” it might work properly, but it’s a bit of a hassle to have to go through that every time.
The simplest solution I found is to use a free “source port” and the one I have the most experience with is Chocolate Doom, which was incredibly easy to set up. After downloading and extracting the program, run the included setup file and under the “mouse configuration” make sure “allow vertical mouse movement” is unchecked. Then copy the .WAD file from wherever you have it stored and drop it into your Chocolate Doom directory. Then all you have to do is run Chocolate Doom. This works for all the .WAD files included in this collection. Without a .WAD file, the game will run the shareware version of Doom II. There are other source ports out there with different features. I’ve barely played with some others as I decided I wanted to stick with the most authentic experience and Chocolate Doom gives me exactly what I want.
As for getting each of the .WADs in the Master Levels for Doom II to work, you may need to use some command lines or another source port, like ZDoom. In Chocolate Doom, you can open the setup file, hit F2 for warp and W to add a .WAD. Put the .WAD file in the same directory and just type in the name of the .WAD file (including the file extension). You may need to read the .TXT file that comes with the .WAD to make sure you're on the right level. ATTACK.WAD was easy to get going, but BLACKTWR.WAD was more difficult, until I read that it's on level 25 and I had to warp to it, which I did the Chocolate Doom setup file.
I did check out GLDoom and GZDoom (or ZDoom). GLDoom didn't have an obvious way of disabling vertical mouse movement, like Chocolate Doom does, but you can turn the vertical sensitivity down to zero. GZDoom (or Zdoom) is like GLDoom in that it runs on OpenGL, but as far as I can tell it does a whole lot more than any of the other source ports I've tried. It has tons of features and even allows you to look around and jump.
I haven’t tried Doom 64 yet, in fact I’ve never played it. However, I did learn in recent weeks about Doom 64 EX. I think you don’t have to worry about this, because, I believe the Steam version was a port. Jon made a post about it, so I recommend checking that out as the included video is pretty informative. You need the .WAD file to run Doom 64 EX, which does not come with the software, but if you purchased the game via Steam and installed it, then I’m sure it’s just a matter of copying a file over into a single directory as described above for the other classics.
I hope this helps. If you need help, feel free to ask, I can try to help you out as best as I can. Have you played these games recently? Have you run into similar issues? If so, how did you get them to work?
Links:
“Doom Classic Complete” collection on IsThereAnyDeal.com: https://isthereanydeal.com/game/doomclassiccomplete/info/
DOSBox: https://www.dosbox.com/
Novert: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/utils/misc/novert
Chocolate Doom: https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/Chocolate_Doom
GZDoom (or ZDoom): https://zdoom.org/downloads
Jon’s post about the Doom 64 port: https://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/4395/nightdive-studios-brings-an-incredible-port-of-doom-64
Doom 64 EX: https://doom64ex.wordpress.com/
As a PC gamer, I’ve gotten used to playing games with a keyboard and a mouse. WASD keys move forward, left, back, and right. The mouse looks up, down, left, and right. I can’t recall how I played the Doom games back in the 90’s, but it certainly feels odd now. This is because moving the mouse forward or backward will move your character in that direction. I found this to be quite odd and annoying. I did some digging online and I found a few different solutions. Some weren’t helping, the game would still lock up and such, but I found another, perhaps easier, solution.
This Steam version of the collection uses DOSBox and I have played around with it a bit starting a few weeks ago. Sure, if you load a separate instance of DOSBox, mount your Doom directory and run “novert.com” (a file you can download for free on the Internet) before “doom.exe” it might work properly, but it’s a bit of a hassle to have to go through that every time.
The simplest solution I found is to use a free “source port” and the one I have the most experience with is Chocolate Doom, which was incredibly easy to set up. After downloading and extracting the program, run the included setup file and under the “mouse configuration” make sure “allow vertical mouse movement” is unchecked. Then copy the .WAD file from wherever you have it stored and drop it into your Chocolate Doom directory. Then all you have to do is run Chocolate Doom. This works for all the .WAD files included in this collection. Without a .WAD file, the game will run the shareware version of Doom II. There are other source ports out there with different features. I’ve barely played with some others as I decided I wanted to stick with the most authentic experience and Chocolate Doom gives me exactly what I want.
As for getting each of the .WADs in the Master Levels for Doom II to work, you may need to use some command lines or another source port, like ZDoom. In Chocolate Doom, you can open the setup file, hit F2 for warp and W to add a .WAD. Put the .WAD file in the same directory and just type in the name of the .WAD file (including the file extension). You may need to read the .TXT file that comes with the .WAD to make sure you're on the right level. ATTACK.WAD was easy to get going, but BLACKTWR.WAD was more difficult, until I read that it's on level 25 and I had to warp to it, which I did the Chocolate Doom setup file.
I did check out GLDoom and GZDoom (or ZDoom). GLDoom didn't have an obvious way of disabling vertical mouse movement, like Chocolate Doom does, but you can turn the vertical sensitivity down to zero. GZDoom (or Zdoom) is like GLDoom in that it runs on OpenGL, but as far as I can tell it does a whole lot more than any of the other source ports I've tried. It has tons of features and even allows you to look around and jump.
I haven’t tried Doom 64 yet, in fact I’ve never played it. However, I did learn in recent weeks about Doom 64 EX. I think you don’t have to worry about this, because, I believe the Steam version was a port. Jon made a post about it, so I recommend checking that out as the included video is pretty informative. You need the .WAD file to run Doom 64 EX, which does not come with the software, but if you purchased the game via Steam and installed it, then I’m sure it’s just a matter of copying a file over into a single directory as described above for the other classics.
I hope this helps. If you need help, feel free to ask, I can try to help you out as best as I can. Have you played these games recently? Have you run into similar issues? If so, how did you get them to work?
Links:
“Doom Classic Complete” collection on IsThereAnyDeal.com: https://isthereanydeal.com/game/doomclassiccomplete/info/
DOSBox: https://www.dosbox.com/
Novert: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/utils/misc/novert
Chocolate Doom: https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/Chocolate_Doom
GZDoom (or ZDoom): https://zdoom.org/downloads
Jon’s post about the Doom 64 port: https://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/4395/nightdive-studios-brings-an-incredible-port-of-doom-64
Doom 64 EX: https://doom64ex.wordpress.com/
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Hey Greg,
I wrote up something about my recent jaunt with Doom source ports too!
https://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/4496/doom-source-port-breakdown
I think i'd recommend Crispy Doom over Chocolate Doom but it requires a bit of tweaking to get it just so to map WASD and get the mouse aim right. That said, it's good iD Software updated The Ultimate Doom & Doom II to the modern Unity Ports as those DOSBox versions are really rough on modern systems (as you note).
It's also fun to see how far things have come since April. Since then we got the Unity ports on Steam and Doom 64 remaster released!
Now that I've completed the original 3 1993 Doom campaigns I'm thinking of trying Sigil or Doom II but I'm not sure which one. Never fully completed Doom II so I think I might play that next.