About vanilla "bonus levels"

[bobstremglav]

What are vanilla bonus levels?

Well, just read this:

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Bonus_level

 

Hovewer, I have some questions:

1) What are these invalid tracks for maps beyond 35? Can you add new midis with required names and they will work, or required invalid tracks are some kind of reading beyond array, etc (meaning you can't paste correct midi for these levels without modifying source code)

2) Which music is used for E5 by default? Can you insert it easily? Because I remember Doom 1 and Ultimate Doom uses simpler system for ost (D_E1M1, D_E1M2, etc, instead of abstract names for Doom 2)

3) Would be nice to have more information about possible bonus levels in other games: Strife, HacX, Chex Quest, Heretic, Hexen. I know that Heretic has E6M1-E6M3, but that's all, and Chex secretly has entirety of Ultimate Doom

[LSC Lasico]

To answer 1: when you load map33, map34, or map35, Doom uses the text screen for map33, start menu screen for map34 and intermission screen for map35. This behavior is unchangable, and you can't make them have unique tracks without help of things like mapinfo. Loading map36 and forward makes doom load a map with a soundtrack that simply does not exist in game, leading to the game crashing even if the map itself exists. In vanilla, it is not possible to create new tracks for maps36 and forward, so the only maps beyond map32 that can be accessed in vanilla are only map33, map34 and map35.

[SuperGiantNinjaYeti]

I didn't know about E5 until now, so I got curious and copy-pasted E2 into a pwad, renamed the maps to E5M* and tested it in Dosbox.
Turns out those map slots use the same music as episode 4, which in turn reuse music lumps from previous levels, so you can't give them unique music (in vanilla) if you intend to do a full 5 episodes wad.
As a side note, I also noticed the sky texture was AASTINKY, not SKY1 as stated in the wiki.