DooM ADD Something
DooM ADD Something
A bit of history: In 1994, I took Matt Fell's excellent Unofficial Doom Specs and wrote a small C++ library to handle WAD files. It used libg++ String and Regex classes and was thus based on streams, which weren't too efficient at that time with both GNU GCC and DJGPP. I used it on a Sparc workstation to assemble WAD files and to figure out the details of sprite replacement and handling for pure educational purposes. At the same time, I got in touch with David Lobser following a discussion of copyright issues and distributions problems - all related, of course, to the very first of the Alien DOOM patches, whis are still available in at www.cdrom.com in themes/aliens, and on its mirrors.
Handling sprites and flats in WAD files has always been different from the other lumps, and while John Carmack at id Software finally tried to change this with the DOOM 1.4 revision, it never worked out. I guess that the flats are stored using interleaving, and thus handled differently, but I fail to see any real difficulties in either case. If they'd used a type of lump indicator in the WAD's directory, there'd have never been a problem, but that's a different issue.
I finally decided to write a very simple utility, DMADDS (formerly "DooM ADD Sprites"), and ported it to DOS, the second step being by far the most difficult one. I finally had to replace the String class, declined using the Regex class, in order to get rid off the C++ streams and shrink the binaries by some 200K overhead down to 20K. Not counting the inevitable GO32 extender, of course. The tool lost all flexibility, and I used template WAD files.
DMADDS was finally distributed with Aliens DOOM, and was used by a couple of sprites replacement WAD projects, including the very first release of Aliens TC by Justin Fisher. In fact, DMADDS was my only contribution to the remarkable Alien DOOM efforts by David Lobser, Dave Matteson, Marc Gordon, Dan Goldwasser and Mike Dickson. I modified DMADDS for flat replacement, too, but I never changed the rather limited way it worked, partly because I do not work with DOS, partly because more advanced and supported tools like DeuSF and NWT were available soon, once the feasibility of sprite replacements was demonstrated by DMADDS.
The announcement of the final DMADDS version as well as the distribution is available, for old times sake. Both the streams based UNIX version and the DOS port have never been available as source, but I might put the remains on some demo page anyway, as an example of my worst.
DMADDS finally earned me my first publication abroad, in a way. In 1994, The Waite Group published a small booklet called "Fatal Distractions" with dozens of shareware games supposedly collected by David Gerrold, featuring the first Alien DOOM release on the few pages about DOOM. I got a sample copy, and my name printed in another book, which by any means is enough revenue for an awkward port like the DMADDS one. Nowadays, a book with an Alien DOOM ad on the cover probably won't happen again, due to inevitably surfacing copyright and trademark issues.
