A weird bug in Doom95 i remember from my childhood (Now recreated!)

[Muusi]

25 minutes ago, DoomGater said:

Is everybody else able to actively control doomguy after his death?

Can you play the game normally? I mean do the controls work if you just start a new game?

[DoomGater]

As already quoted, no I can't. As Doomkid said: "it doesn't respond to any inputs from me at all. I can't bring up the menu, I can't interact with the game in any way whatsoever."

[Doomkid]

16 hours ago, Mattfrie1 said:

EDIT: Here's another strange part of this anomaly. After enabling IDDQD following the resurrection all enemies wake back up, but are stuck in place in their walking animations and are unable to attack you. Is this normal zombie player behavior or is it exclusive to this demo version?

I think it is normal behavior. In 1.666 & 1.9, I know the enemies just march in place if you type IDDQD after you die, similar to what's seen here.

[BCHQ]

On 4/16/2021 at 3:01 AM, Muusi said:

Uploaded an even better version.

 

When you're a poor hungry zombie looking for brains, but idiots around you haven't got any.

[129thVisplane]

As someone who used to get nightmares about minor graphical errors in crappy '94 maps, this would've probably given me super-nightmares if I had this CD back in the day.

I gave it a spin, got it to work on my win7 machine with dxwnd, at first input was unresponsive like other people in the thread said but I managed to fix it by tabbing out and back in. I also noticed that the statusbar is prone to freezing when the player's health gets low even outside of demos, and resizing the screen space just makes it worse. Speaking of which, did later versions of Doom95 have that little message at the top when resizing the view? I thought that was neat. Might be a debug feature from this particular early version.

Spoiler

 

 

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

This maybe a bit off topic of the bug from the November 1995 build of DOOM95, but I've decided to examine the following Windows 95 shareware & demo CD-ROMs that I've stumbled upon on Internet Archive from 1996 to 1998 with most released at retail & bundled with PC gaming coverdiscs and the DOOM95 executable dates for each disc with their publisher.

 

Doom95: November 14th and/or 15th 1995 build - Games for Windows 95 (Microsoft, 1995 or 1996), Eigen PC 50 - De 50 beste programma's van Eigen PC (Uitgeverij Computerbranche BV, 2000), FluoROM #7 - Eigen PC Nr. 47 (Uitgeverij Computerbranche BV, 2000)
Doom95: June 6th and/or 12 1996 build - Ultimate DOOM & DOOM II later PC releases (GT Interactive & id Software, 1996), Final DOOM retail release (GT Interactive & id Software, 1996), Doom Collector's Edition (Activision & id Software, 2001 & 2003/2004), Action Ware 3 - Extra levels for Doom (Action Ware, 1996), 95 Maailman Parasta Windows 95 Peliä (Kompuutteri-lehti, 1997), Juegos De Terror 3D (Ediciones Top Multimedia, 2002)
Doom95: November 26th 1996 build - id Anthology (GT Interactive & id Software, 1996)

 

These are some of the CD-ROMs for Windows 95 that I could find when searching Doom95 on Internet Archive. Just wanted to let anyone know about Doom95's appearance on Shareware CD-ROMs.

Edited March 31, 2022 by Wadmodder Shalton

[Muusi]

Oh god the "Kompuutteri" magazine. Always hated that name. It's like if there was an english magazine and they called it the "Information Machine" magazine. Makes equally as much sense.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Has anyone attempted to document the November 1995 build of Doom95 and feature it on the DoomWiki's entry for Doom95.

[Ultima_]

I just wanted to say that this is incredible to see being discovered as I had this same demo disc as a kid and this is literally how I first experienced Doom before my dad got a copy of Doom 2 from one of his coworkers that I played through the on-disc Doom95 source port for YEARS. For a long time (until like this last year or so) I assumed I’d dreamt up this demo disc, but seeing it fully archived makes me so happy to know those memories were real, and to know that I probably experienced an incredibly broken version of Doom as my first impressions of it haha :D

[Muusi]

3 hours ago, Ultima_ said:

that I played through the on-disc Doom95 source port for YEARS. 

How I wish I knew how to do this in the late 90's.

[Ultima_]

9 hours ago, Muusi said:

How I wish I knew how to do this in the late 90's.

I don’t even fully remember how/when I figured out you could play Doom 2 on Windows back then, just have distinct memories of playing it on Win98/ME and XP using Doom95 from that CD :D

[Muusi]

My problem back then was that our PC was upgraded and sadly we got Win2000 so I couldn't use the DOS executables anymore. Dark and sad times. 

 

Then PSX Doom happened and I was very happy. 

Edited August 19, 2021 by Muusi

[Dynamo]

On 7/20/2021 at 8:59 PM, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Has anyone attempted to document the November 1995 build of Doom95 and feature it on the DoomWiki's entry for Doom95.

This has been added, but late because nobody on the wiki was made aware of this thread until two days ago. The wiki is a collaborative effort, anyone on this thread could have reached out or, even better, added it themselves, as ultimately it's something that takes about as much effort as a forum post. I thank you all for looking into this and allowing us to document this unexpected build and associated behavior.

 

I have not bumped this thread for that though. I've been messing around with this build in my Windows 95 copy on VMWare (I unfortunately have not yet figured out how to implement working sound on it, if anyone knows how to, I'd appreciate knowing), and I've noticed some more odd behavior. Here's a brief rundown.

 

I was playing MAP01 normally and I ended up getting damaged to the point where I was on 1% health. At this point, I backed away from the imp that damaged me and noticed that the status bar was not changing from the last time I was damaged. Then I tried picking up health, but no health amount I picked up actually increased my health at all, making me stuck at 1%.

Then I went back to the imp, and got him to damage me again, at which point the game somehow gave me all the health pickups I had picked up prior (health bonuses and stimpacks) and got my health back to 10%, then I immediately got damaged again and died but again without having the health bar or status bar reflect this change properly.

And this is just from preliminary testing on the first level, it's not like I used the demo playback function or did anything particularly specific. I feel like there's much more to discover with this build, and naturally, more to document on the DoomWiki once we've actually figured out what is going on and why (some reverse engineering may be required here as unfortunately Doom95 remains closed source).

 

Restarting MAP01 once again, you might think that the imp had killed me but the game chalked it up as just being at 1% health. However I tried again with a zombieman, who got me at 10% health and I am now experiencing the same effects. There is an additional bug when saving and loading: it allows me to pick up items normally again, but it changes the player view to be lower (haven't checked if this stacks yet), and still does not correctly restore the status bar to normal working behavior. These effects seem to trigger when your health is at 39% or below.

 

I am trying to record all this but OBS has the worst ever interface when it comes to recording a specific part of the screen (since it doesn't capture VMWare properly) so I'm still trying to figure that out.

 

EDIT: oh god what is going on please help

This has to be the status bar garbage data bug that Doomkid mentioned earlier...

But it only happens when you reduce the screen size, otherwise this happens:

This is so fundamentally broken that I find it remarkable this would get shipped in a CD at all, even as a demo.

Edited December 7, 2023 by Dynamo

[Dynamo]

On 4/7/2021 at 9:07 PM, OleBumma said:

that's a very early version of the Doom95 engine (dated Nov. '95, probably the earliest I can recall of) that you have there, which was released on one of the authors' personal page, and might still be subject to some rough bugs that went unnoticed.

Author page? Do you remember which page and where?

EDIT: I managed to record a video showcasing the bug. From what I can tell, the bug involves the status bar failing to update properly whenever the player's health is at less than 40% (including armor and ammo counters). The bug goes away whenever the player's health gets above that amount, but it also gets updated upon taking damage apparently, hence why the imp and zombie seemingly "heal" me when hitting me.