Super Jamie

I was recently sitting on IRC bitching about how I couldn't run the latest Minecraft because of a bug in the Linux ATI drivers, couldn't run Doom Builder 2, was sick of messing around with Wine to get my Steam games running and I thought "Fuck this, I'll just start using Windows 7".

So a week later, everything is fine. I've been Minecrafting away, opening maps in DB2, finished Shadowgrounds and everything's happy.

Except one thing - playing Doom.

Under Linux I used the terminal to create aliases, so typing doom2 was the same thing as typing /home/superjamie/doom/prboom-plus-2.5.1.1/prboom-plus -iwad /home/superjamie/doom/iwads/doom2.wad and so on. This makes it easy to chuck PWADs on the Desktop and launch them in whatever order I want (doom2 -file file1.wad file2.wad) and to play/record demos (doom2 -playdemo file.lmp or doom2 -record file.lmp).

Under Windows a similar command would be "C:\Users\Super Jamie\Documents\doom\prboom-plus-2.5.1.1\prboom-plus.exe" -iwad "C:\Users\Super Jamie\Documents\doom\IWADs\doom2.wad" which is way too long for my liking. I played around with the frontend ZDL for a while which is good cos it lets you order wadfiles but has no facility for playing demos beyond typing in a (long) command. I also tried CDL which plays demos but doesn't order wadfiles. Jodwin kindly lent me the source but evidently C# is beyond my skill and patience level. Surely there is some way I can just type doom2 in a box and have things work the way I want them to.

There is!

I created a file called aliases.bat and filled it with the aliases I had under Linux but using DOSKey. For example:

code:
Array

The $* passes all additional parameters on so -file and -record work correctly.

Some instructions here indicate how to have it auto-start when you run a Command Prompt window.

Now I can again just chuck stuff on the Desktop, type doom2 -file pwad.wad or play demos or whatever and it even has tab completion. Win.