DOS ain't dead

Hi! Yesterday I tried to run game Unreal with HX-DOS. It didn't work however maybe it wouldn't be so difficult to make it run.

Unreal has a awesome fantastic software renderer (besides Glide and Direct3D). It does not relly to external DLLs but has everything bundled with.

So, when I started it under HX-DOS it complains about missing export ShellExecuteW. Is it trivial or difficult to implement it?
If I set DPMILDR=128 (ignore unresolved imports) the game starts, switches into graphics mode mouse cursor is visible and reacts on mouse moving but nothing more happens.

Do you think it is possible to get Unreal to work with HX-DOS?

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DOS-u-akbar!

> Do you think it is possible to get Unreal to work with HX-DOS?

Possible? Definitely - if you have a lot of free time.

But I guess that such a DOS-version - which can't use hardware acceleration - cannot compete with the Windows version.

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MS-DOS forever!

> But I guess that such a DOS-version - which can't use hardware acceleration
> - cannot compete with the Windows version.

The trick is that Unreal has (besides Glide and Direct3D) very optimized software renderer WITHOUT hardware acceleration. (well, maybe only some bliting from RAM into VideoRAM)
I was asking about the possibility of Unreal in DOS because it reports only one missing import and statement "ShellExecuteW" sounds like something not difficult to implement it.

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DOS-u-akbar!

> I was asking about the possibility of Unreal in DOS because it reports only
> one missing import and statement "ShellExecuteW" sounds like something not
> difficult to implement it.

Does it run under Windows 9x? I thought that -W calls generally are NT specific.

> Does it run under Windows 9x? I thought that -W calls generally are NT
> specific.

Does it run under FreeBSD x64 with WINE??? Enquiring minds want to know.

EDIT: I also suppose a link would've been more informative for those of us who don't game as much. Is this it? (Apparently it's already been ported to Linux long ago.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal
http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/unreal

> Does it run under Windows 9x? I thought that -W calls generally are NT
> specific.

Sure! It is from 1998 and I run it on my Windows 98 machine.

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DOS-u-akbar!

> Sure! It is from 1998 and I run it on my Windows 98 machine.

Yes, I remember well. Even I used Win95 OSR2 that times. This was the game that pushed me to buy 3Dfx Voodoo 1 that enabled me to play this on o'clocked Pentium 1 @200MHz in 640x480/hicolor quite well and enjoyed the nice graphics. SW rendered was not bad but more CPU hungry so I would had to use 320x200...

ShellExecuteW seems to be unicode variant of ShellExecute and it is supported from Windows XP. Maybe Unreal running under HX misdetected Windows version and try to call NT-api. Maybe it could be enforced to think it's running on Win9x to avoid this call...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> ShellExecuteW seems to be unicode variant of
> ShellExecute
> and it is supported from Windows XP. Maybe Unreal running under HX
> misdetected Windows version and try to call NT-api. Maybe it could be
> enforced to think it's running on Win9x to avoid this call...

That is even better than what I was thinking; I was thinking he was running the later GoTY version (packaged with some Unreal Tournament GoTY and Anthology versions), that had been "upgraded" to more recent Windows versions.

Well, in the fact I am running Unreal gold. So it is not the very first release of this game. I am running it under windows 98 but with KernelEX installed. So I'll do some more testing.

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DOS-u-akbar!

> Well, in the fact I am running Unreal gold. So it is not the very first
> release of this game. I am running it under windows 98 but with KernelEX
> installed. So I'll do some more testing.

And do you have KeX set specific 2k/XP mode for this version of Unreal? (I use KeX disabled by default and enabling it only for specific exe to have control over it). So try to run older version from original CD. But even Unreal Trournament does run under Win98 without need to enable KeX support.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> Well, in the fact I am running Unreal gold. So it is not the very first
> release of this game. I am running it under windows 98 but with KernelEX
> installed. So I'll do some more testing.

Yeah, try running the original version (1.0, if possible, and you can still find it) and report back.

I remember the Unreal game from 15 years ago (!) and it still has fabulous graphics quality, even in 2D rendering mode. Now, with ultra-fast CPUs, its software rendering could be put to great use, with CPU power to spare. I would love to be able to run it from HX, or one can dream of a native DJGPP port of the Unreal engine. Seems to me someone did that or attempted to do it back in the day. Like all the new .EXEs for the Quake Engine, Doom engine, etc that have appeared. Perhaps I am confusing it with the Hexen 2 DOS release, however.

> I would love to be able to run it from HX, or one can dream of a native DJGPP
> port of the Unreal engine. Seems to me someone did that or attempted to do
> it back in the day. Like all the new .EXEs for the Quake Engine, Doom
> engine, etc that have appeared. Perhaps I am confusing it with the Hexen 2
> DOS release, however.

I think you mean Hexen II DJGPP port that is still developed and improved. I don't know about any other port project of similar game.
I rather play Unreal with modernized renderer engine and hi-res texture pack (about 2GB? of new textures). Of course it's not all about nice rendering, Unreal is great with it's detailed models, large landscapes an buildings, mixing ancient and future architecture, great music that powers the atmosphere... Also it's quite complex and long to play compared to some nowdays games you can finish in 2 days. I played Unreal many times again and I'm still attracted to it, simply game of my heart :)

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Today I tried the earlier Unreal release (not the Unreal Gold)
It does not more complain about missing ShellExecuteW - it just does not work.

The game starts, graphics mode is set, the mouse cursor is shown and reacts on mouse moves but nothing more happens and I have to press CTRL-ALT-DEL

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DOS-u-akbar!

> > I would love to be able to run it from HX, or one can dream of a native
> DJGPP
> > port of the Unreal engine. Seems to me someone did that or attempted to
> do
> > it back in the day. Like all the new .EXEs for the Quake Engine, Doom
> > engine, etc that have appeared. Perhaps I am confusing it with the Hexen
> 2
> > DOS release, however.
>
> I think you mean Hexen II DJGPP port that is still developed and improved.
> I don't know about any other port project of similar game.

Hammer of Thyrion (aka, Hexen 2 for DOS via DJGPP 2.04++, and moreso other OSes) is based upon Quake 1, which was targeted (1994-6) to Intel Pentiums with DOS via DJGPP (GCC 2.7.2, DJGPP 2.00 beta3 or such), probably because Win95 didn't exist yet when the project started. (CWS fixed it to also work with Win95, but WinNT was a lost cause ... at least without further work that would've delayed development even more. Nearptrs, extra month needed, WinNT "not meant for games", bugs, etc.)

The original Hexen 2 (1997) was Win95 only. So (AFAIK) it wasn't really ported to DOS but brought back to completion via the DOS bits from Quake's sources (1999). HoT doesn't support MIDI music in DOS, but you can rip the CD audio to .OGG and play that, if you have an SB-compatible (or GUS? but I just used DOSEMU).

I think Ozkan Sezer (2006) did the DOS "port" of HoT for retro nostalgia. He may even still have some old machines he plays with, dunno. (The most stable port is Linux, which [like Windows] has an optional OpenGL-based renderer via glh2.)

Latest version of Hammer of Thyrion is 1.5.6. (IIRC, it only supports the four-char demo, not the older two-char one. For full game, I bought a used CD from Amazon, but if you're so inclined, you may prefer Steam.)

http://uhexen2.sourceforge.net/download.html#dos_zip

> 2006-11-22: Initial DOS port for Hexen II: Hammer of Thyrion
> I prepared an initial DOS port of Hexen II (hey, I was bored and felt
> nostalgic ;), it seems to work fairly good.

> 2008-04-04: Hammer of Thyrion version 1.4.3 is released.
> Version 1.4.3 of Hexen II: Hammer of Thyrion is released:
> This release is a result of heavy maintainance after the previous 1.4.2
> version and fixes several bugs, including some security related ones
> such as the hexenworld Huffman decoder vulnerability (Secunia advisory
> SA28124), and improves portability. There have been a few feature
> improvements, as well. It also features a DOS port and an experimental
> svgalib support. An updated game data, v1.19a, is provided along with
> HoT-1.4.3, too.