First post, by Raymond C. Glassford
I recently purchased Hexen 1.0 and the Hexen add-on, 'Deathkings of the Dark Citadel', on CD. Hexen 1.0 must be patched to Hexen 1.1 before 'Deathkings of the Dark Citadel' can be used. The 'Deathkings of the Dark Citadel' CD includes the necessary patch. Unfortunately, Mandriva Linux 2007.0 sets the file timestamps to the current date and time, making this the case also for DOSbox-0.72. The current filestamps cause the patch program to abort with the message "... hexen.exe does not have the correct date."
I have used the Linux 'touch' command to reset the timestamps for hexen.exe and hexen.wad to 1995-10-13 14:13, which is the timestamp for hexen.wad on the CD. The file hexen.exe is not accessible on the CD; it is generated only after the CD's install.bat file is run, so I am not certain what its timestamp would read if it was installed using MS-DOS.
I would like to know if anyone using Linux and DOSbox has found a workaround for this problem, or something similar for another game. I experienced the same problem when trying to patch Doom 2 1.666 to Doom 2 1.9, and never did find a solution (my download could have been the officially designated 'pirated' release). I would also appreciate it if someone could provide the original timestamps, preferably for all files, when Hexen 1.0 on CD is installed using MS-DOS, or DOSbox running under Microsoft Windows. When I have the timestamps for at least both hexen.exe and hexen.wad, I could try to see if the timestamp format is causing the problem. Perhaps, changing 'yyyy-mm-dd' to 'mm-dd-yyyy' will be the solution.