Weird error when starting Eternity

[JadedLexi]

When I start Eternity, it says it finds the Doom 2 IWad, but then after that it says the IWad tag is not present. Could someone help me with this?

[esselfortium]

You can thank XWE for that; unless you turn off its auto-backup function, it'll for some reason turn any iwads you run through it into pwads. ZDoom ignores this, but most other sourceports are stricter about it. You could manually hex-edit the file to change the "PWAD" back to "IWAD", or restore from a backup if you have one.

[JadedLexi]

I don't really know much about Hex-editing or have any programs I know of that could hex-edit in general. But thanks anyway.

[esselfortium]

Well, it's just a matter of changing one letter from a P to an I at the very beginning of it like it was before XWE messed with it, and saving the file. I was going to suggest that you might even be able to use Notepad to do it, but it's taking an excessively long time to open Doom2.wad for me so maybe that wouldn't be the best idea.

And then make sure not to let XWE mess with your iwads again. You could probably also just lock the file in Windows, in its properties window or something. Either way it's really really really bad practice on XWE's part :(

[Gez]

esselfortium said:

I was going to suggest that you might even be able to use Notepad to do it, but it's taking an excessively long time to open Doom2.wad for me so maybe that wouldn't be the best idea.

That is never going to work, because a lot of bytes that don't correspond to any character are going to be lost. Never use a text editor for a binary file.

[Quasar]

Look for a freeware program called XVI32. It is a very small, very reliable, and very easy to use hex editor. From now on, I would back up your IWADs before loading them into any program - especially one with so many known data maintenance issues.

Some of Eternity's functions require the IWAD tag to be present in the proper file, so I cannot just remove this check.