requesting help for playing an old shovelware WAD compilation.

[shroomie]

so i was on myabandonware and found some old shovelware wad collections (specifically Doom Heaven and Doom Heaven II,) that i want to play, but as i'm not really an OG player, i don't understand how exactly to *play* the WAD connection. basically, the file is a .zip archive, and inside is an .ISO disk image. anyone know what i can do to play some bad old doom maps?

[A339]

Is it D!Zone wads?

 

 

[shroomie]

what's a D!Zone wad? also, i neglected to add the link to one of the compilations, Doom Heaven II, which is here: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/doom-heaven-ii-eo6

Edited December 13, 2023 by shroomie
clarified which compilation i was linking to.

[shroomie]

ok so update i've opened the iso image and inside is a folder with all the wads, but, i'm still unaware how i can play all of these with the presentation you may have experienced back in the 90's.

 

yes i know my writing style is weird, i haven't really lurked much and don't know fully how people on the forum typically speak.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Not clear on if you're trying to say you want to run them from DOSBox or what but assuming that's the case, the DOS way to run wads is as follows:

 

Unzup and put PWADs in your game folder, then run

DOOM.EXE -file <somemap.wad>

or

DOOM2.EXE -file <somemap.wad>

where <somemap.wad> is the filename of the WAD file you want to use.

 

If you're trying to run some frontend program that came with the shovelware compilation, sometimes they don't work right in DOSBox I've found.  A workaround is to get a copy of 4DOS, mount all your DOSBox stuff (you won't be able to mount while 4DOS is running), then run 4DOS before you run the frontend.

 

If you're actually trying to just run WADs on a port then they usually understand drag-and-drop of the file though outside of (G)ZDoom you may have to unzip them first.

[shroomie]

2 minutes ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

If you're actually trying to just run WADs on a port then they usually understand drag-and-drop of the file though outside of (G)ZDoom you may have to unzip them first.

 

yeah i've been (slightly) confused as to how to get this to run on my copy of GZDoom (which i usually launch from the command line, as on Mac trying to get it to play multiple mods is finicky), this is probably the right answer but i had thought that they'd be bundled into actual compilation WADs as DH and DHII have some.. uhh, beautiful cover art.

[shroomie]

i hadn't really considered that this was maybe something that would come with a launcher itself, and it almost definitely did as poking around in the disc image i found this little ""gem"" advertising their other stuff.

[yakfak]

what era is this for? dos, win 95? if you can host the ISO as a cd drive there should hopefully be a setup/install program which you can run either through dosbox or through a virtual machine and that'll unpack the doom heaven client too, if it's there

it might just be a bunch of .bat files though, some of these things were pretty cheap and cheerful

 

edit: ohhhhhh it probably expects either doom.exe or doom95 and won't be able to hook into gzdoom or anything

Edited December 15, 2023 by yakfak

[shroomie]

yeah, i'll just manually try playing these mods maybe.