If you're bent on running Heretic, Hexen, or any of the other Doom-engine games in their original format, you're going to have some problems. I'm sure some of the more frequent users of this forum can provide more information in regard to that.

However, I highly recommend using a source port. My personal favorite is available at http://www.doomsdayhq.com . JDoom/JHeretic/JHexen support all the features of the original games, add an OpenGL layer for graphics (looks good!) and revised sound. The biggest improvement, though, is that the whole thing is Win32 native, and the author didn't mess around with the play-balance of the game too much.

There are other ports, as well, such as ZDoom, which may have built-in Hexen support (I forget). But, unless you're really bent on having the full-on "retro" experience, I'd generally recommend using a Win32 source port over trying to get the original games to work. Try http://www.newdoom.com to get you started.

Yep yep. What Unregistered said. zHeretic/zHexen/zDoom will all be MUCH better in the first place, and in the second place, we've found it basically impossible to run any DOOM engine games in their original formats.

I downloaded Jheretic, but found out that there are two weird things with this patched version.

a: the game is *awefully* slow. With slow I mean very, very slow. The sound is way ahead of the real action, there's a latency of more than a second between using a key and the physical action in the game. I have a duron 800 mhz, 384 mb of sd-ram and a ati rage pro 8mb at agp 2x. I'm going to try the game next week with an geforce2 mx 400 64 mb, but is my current that slow that this Jheretic is *this* slow?
b: The only functional colours are green and black. Furthermore, the screen is very dark. It looks like the other two RGB colours (blue and red) simply are absent. Any thoughts on the reason of this phenomenon?

Kind regards,
Inge

ps: I got registered...woehoe! But how can I use my personal avatar (http://www.students.let.uu.nl/home/i.janse/images/pop.jpg)?

"ati rage pro 8mb at agp 2x"

ATI's driver's "Pre-Radeon" and even Pre-Radeon 9700 have always been crappy. As of the Radeon 9700 ATI's Drivers have finally reached a competitive level with Nvidia. The video card that you listed is one of ATI's cards that had TERRIBLE OpenGL support. In fact I remember using Scitech GlDirect on my Parent's Compaq with that very same graphics cards instead of the graphics cards OGL drivers because the OGL drivers were crap. The Geforce will make a CONSIDERABLE difference. In fact you'll be able to run alot more games, they'll look better. and they'll be more compatible with your computer (due to a good graphics card as opposed to the craptacular ATI RAGE series)

Dosfreak,

thanks for your swift reply and extensive explanation, but games aren't my primary interest. I simply wanted to sniff up some of my youth-memories. Doing wave editing simply requires little more than an ISA 512 kb videocard 😉 But, as a summary, I understand that the ATI is the cause of all evil, so I'll renew this topic once I checked it with the MX400.

Thumbs up for this forum & kind regards,
Inge

Just so you know, there also Win32 ports that don't use 3D acceleration. You could always try one of them. Even the Id Win9x version of DOOM should work properly.

Okay, thank you all! I exchanged the ati rage pro for a geforce mx 64 mb, and jheretic works like a charm! It's beautiful to see the openGL version of this game, especially with the new music. Thanks alot for your kind concerns!

Kind regards,
Inge

Another stupid problem solved. Closing thread: RESOLVED