Wrong colours in Doom95 with GT 710 GPU

[860]

Hello. Ever since I added a GT 710 GPU in my computer I haven't been able to run Doom95 properly. I could get it to work on the onboard Intel GMA X4500 GPU, but with the new graphics card the colours are all wrong. In case any Sonic fans read this, picture those infamous "Sonic in Paynt" hacks but with Doom instead. He, I'll show you. https://i.ibb.co/PwD0sYR/dom-in-paynt-min.jpg

I shall name these levels. "hanger", "gren cross", "red forst" and "blue ski 1".. I'm just joking. Ignore the screen distortion and convergence issues, they are due to my monitor's faulty circuitry, not the game or GPU.

 

What is this glitch and how can I fix it?

[Edward850]

Doom95 needs to be run with 256 colour compatability mode.

Though honestly you shouldn't really be running Doom95 at all, it's thoroughly redundant nowadays in every possible way, it'll be better to use something like chocolate-doom or crispy-doom which have modern hardware compatibility while still being a vanilla port.

Edited July 28, 2023 by Edward850

[860]

That doesn't work. What GPU do you have?

[Edward850]

Not applicable, I haven't run Doom95 since XP, and running it now would be a mess in Windows 11 given the need to pull various old DirectX files.

[D4NUK1]

Downgrade to Nvidia GeForce 50XX, or a actual GPU compatible stuff.

Or try PCemu, a Emulator of Olders PC and Hardware (including GPU like Voodoo), and try you look there with a 95, 98 or XP Diestro.

Edited July 28, 2023 by D4NUK1

[Berubaretto]

Try this one, it works on my Windows 11 laptop.

 

[Async Unicorn]

It looks cool, actually. Acid experience.
1960s, hippie, psychedelic rock, all that stuff...

Edited July 28, 2023 by Vanilla+Unicorn

[860]

That OpenRift character sure's got an attitude eh? He must've been traumatized by Doom95 when it came out in the 90's. I wonder why? I've never played the game on the DOS engine. But thanks for sharing that forum thread, it led me to investigate about dgvoodoo. I had heard that name before.. I downloaded it, configured it and copied the DLL files to the game's folder. Lo and behold, the game shows up dressed in its normal colours. I'm not sure on what kind of voodoo magic it operates. Is it a DirectX emulator? I made it to the third stage, with keyboard controls because the fan-made mouse patch does not work anymore. How did I manage to play it that way back then? I got wrist pain after a minute. Perhaps I'm too old now. The visuals of the game seemed OK, despite going through an emulated API. I'd really like to know more about how it works, and what causes the colour issue. Is the GT 710 incompatible with the API used by the game? Nowhere online did I find a statement about NVidia dropping support for Doom95 or an API.

 

12 hours ago, Vanilla+Unicorn said:

It looks cool, actually. Acid experience.
1960s, hippie, psychedelic rock, all that stuff...

I could do a Doom95 playthrough with Piper playing in the background, but it'll be with the correct colours. If you really like the visuals, you could get a GT 710 GPU to experience them yourself, haha.

[Edward850]

39 minutes ago, 860 said:

Is the GT 710 incompatible with the API used by the game? Nowhere online did I find a statement about NVidia dropping support for Doom95 or an API. 

It's not the GPU that's the problem, but Doom95 itself. It wasn't designed against the proper DirectX spec and as a result it technically worked back then but as the hardware and driver revisions change the issues themselves become exposed. Things like dgvoodoo are just compatibility shims that will redirect old rendering instructions to newer standards bypassing common older problems.

Edited July 29, 2023 by Edward850

[860]

I beat the first episode. Man this game is so intense on the keyboard! My left hand hurt a lot. I even visited the "Military Base" secret level, do you guys remember about that one? I wasn't able to get the chainsaw in E1M2 however. I forgot how you get to it. Is it through the maze? It's so fun to mow through the enemies with the chaingun, it's my favourite weapon.

How accurate is dgvoodoo? I didn't really notice any anomalies while playing, but I haven't run Doom95 with the real API in quite a long time.

GZDoom became my main engine in 2016 IIRC, due to running into some fan-made maps that didn't work in Doom95. However, Doom95 has some qualities to it that make it irreplaceable, mostly in the audio and visual departments. I love the sound effects, and the picture has a grainy and contrasted look that I was never able to replicate in GZDoom. The picture isn't as stretched vertically, and the plasma rifle's firing sound is not overbearing. However, the melee weapons are a lot less powerful, due to some gameplay changes and more strict collision detection. Oh, I also love how the partial invisibility effect uses a cool shader, instead of a lazy transparency effect like in GZDoom. But it does make the spectres a lot harder to see, hehe.

[Herr Dethnout]

Having dozens and dozens of sourceports... Why Doom95?

 

Y recommend you Doom Retro, it has a vanilla mode if you don't want the visual enhancements :P

[Shepardus]

17 hours ago, 860 said:

GZDoom became my main engine in 2016 IIRC, due to running into some fan-made maps that didn't work in Doom95. However, Doom95 has some qualities to it that make it irreplaceable, mostly in the audio and visual departments. I love the sound effects, and the picture has a grainy and contrasted look that I was never able to replicate in GZDoom. The picture isn't as stretched vertically, and the plasma rifle's firing sound is not overbearing. However, the melee weapons are a lot less powerful, due to some gameplay changes and more strict collision detection. Oh, I also love how the partial invisibility effect uses a cool shader, instead of a lazy transparency effect like in GZDoom. But it does make the spectres a lot harder to see, hehe.

Doom 95 not vertically stretching the picture is incorrect behavior that GZDoom (along with most other source ports) is correct to compensate for.

 

Melee weapons are indeed harder to use in Doom 95 and vanilla DOS Doom due to the collision for them being super broken. GZDoom corrects these bugs by default, but there are compatibility flags to revert to the original behavior.

 

If you use the software renderer in GZDoom the partial invisibility effect will be fuzz like in the original game. If you use the hardware renderer, GZDoom has multiple options for the partial invisibility effect, including one that looks quite close to the software renderer's fuzz effect. With the right settings (sector lightmode, palette tonemap, etc.) you can get the hardware renderer looking reasonably close to software.

 

Or you could just use Chocolate or Crispy Doom and get all the classic look and behavior with much less fuss. Those ones even let you disable the aspect ratio correction if you so wish. There is no reason to be using Doom 95 nowadays.

Edited July 30, 2023 by Shepardus

[860]

If the dgvoodoo API correctly emulates the original then on the contrary, I have no reasons to use anything else than Doom95. I did like to switch between GZDoom and Doom95 depending on my mood.

 

I got the mouse to work with the fan-made hack, dmousexp. It did not work earlier because the executable did not close properly.

 

Thank you for pointing me in the direction of dgvoodoo! So far, I like it.

[AmethystViper]

You might want to look into setting up VirtualMIDISynth and download the SC-55 soundfont so you can get better sounding music with Doom95 instead of using the stock MIDI Wave Synth that ships with Windows.

[Lila Feuer]

Doom95 was my first introduction to the game and as such I'm quite nostalgic for it. The sound was indeed different as the audio was slightly pitch shifted down. If there's one fatal flaw then it's the absence of DeHackEd support, which breaks anything using it. You also can't load multiple WADs due to the launcher iirc so you'd be playing an old megawad like Memento Mori and have no new music. Seriously, what were they thinking?

[Dark Pulse]

On 8/30/2023 at 12:36 AM, Lila Feuer said:

Seriously, what were they thinking?

"That'll get people off of DOS. Hah."

Edited September 6, 2023 by Dark Pulse

[LoatharMDPhD]

5 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

"That'll get people off of DOS. Hah."

Which Version? 5.1.4??? ..... Or DRDOS?

Edited September 6, 2023 by LoatharMDPhD

[Dark Pulse]

3 hours ago, LoatharMDPhD said:

Which Version? 5.1.4??? ..... Or DRDOS?

Considering Microsoft back then? Both were just as good.

[860]

On 8/30/2023 at 12:36 AM, Lila Feuer said:

You also can't load multiple WADs due to the launcher iirc so you'd be playing an old megawad like Memento Mori and have no new music.

You can if you launch it with the -file parameter.