Wolfenstein WiiBrew

Hey, I was wondering if anybody here knew how to contact "mrpnut" AKA MrPeanut AKA Nick Cavallo, the creator of the Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny Wii ports. I was very impressed with them and was hoping I could help him with them. I cant seem to find valid contact for him anywhere. Im sorry if this isnt the right place to post. I read the instructions and I thought this would be the best place.

A few things I found when checking into this was that he is/was a member at dcemu.co.uk so you may be able to find a user profile there if he still is a member. An earlier version of his engines for the wolf and spear ports had downloads hosted on other forums where it mentions in the description that he could be contacted via irc, though no specific channel was given, and that may have changed since then. Finally you may want to ask Arikado who is an admin here. He helped a little with the controller code for the engine ports so he may have an e-mail address, or know of other means to contact him.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2010 04:37AM by nightwishfan1.

For privacy purposes I've PM'd you his e-mail address. Good luck!

Thanks man! :)
You're the best!

DOH!
Thought Ide let you know that that e-mail, like the other 3 or 4 Ive found for him, is dead. :(
Returned mail, user unknown, you know the drill.
Boy, this guy goes through e-mail addresses like I go through.....
Uh, Im going to leave that sentance incomplete.

Sorry about that man. I don't know of any other way to contact him unfortunately. If you want you're free to run your code questions/suggestions by me as I have a bit of experience with the code and the Wolfenstein 3D engine. If you've already made improvements to the source you're best bet is to probably just release it under a new name being sure to give credit to mrpnut where credit is due.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2010 09:04PM by Arikado.

Have you played his ports?
They both work perfectly. The 2 expansions though, dont.....
It works in a funny way. You install them into the directory Spear of Destiny is in, then you run a file called "SOD.EXE" and it brings up a little menu. You press 1 to install regular Spear of Destiny, 2 to install "Mission 2: Return to Danger" and 3 to install "Mission 3: The Ultimate Challenge" Oh, and you can press 4 for a "Mission Generator"

Works fine on the PC. The mission 1, 2, and 3 files are all kept in special backup files with the extensions SD1, SD2, or SD3, with the actual, running Spear of Destiny files being .SOD
So when you use the SOD.EXE, what it does is replace all the .SOD files for the one level pack, with ones from the others, then you just run the game like normal and you have a different set of levels. (Both mission packs have a full 30 levels to em)

I tried to just run the SOD.EXE thing and replace the regular Spear of Destiny files with Mission Pack 2 files, then give it its own entry in the Homebrew Channel, using the program Peanut made for Spear, but it didnt work. Got a couple errors about sounds. There ARE some new enemies and textures and things in the 2 new mission packs. Not much, but enough so they both look different from Wolf and Spear. Anyways, thats about all I know, other than the fact that Ide love to get these working somehow. If anybody is interested, I can send them the files for the mission packs. Im not sure about copyrights, but Im pretty sure its not "warez" material. Both were made by FromGen, and they died ages ago. Anyways, my apologies if you consider them to be warez. Youve been very helpful and Ide hate to get on your bad side. :)

Just because Formgen doesnt exist anymore doesnt mean that someone else has retained the rights to the mission packs. Usually when a company dies off their rights to certain things are bought by others, or the whole company, and rights to everything they have developed are bought outright. That, or as you assume their rights to what they develop become abandoned.

Anyways I messed with the mission packs on the Spear of Destiny build of the Wii engine about a year ago, and honestly they wont all run under one directory. Back then I managed to get one of them running, but forget how I did so, cause from what I remember you need three separate copies of the Spear of Destiny Wii build as the mission packs on PC would run off the main Spear of Destiny game. Spear of Destiny mission one was required to run them. Reason I dont remember how to get them working is cause I only had two SD cards. One for my Wiiware games, and the other for homebrew. Putting three builds of Spear of Destiny onto the same card wouldnt work. The app wouldnt load at all and you got either a lock up, or immediately spat back to the homebrew channel. So my interest in getting them all working just faded as I didnt have multiple storage mediums to do what needed to be done.

Also I looked a bit more and Mrpeanut does have a profile on dcemu. It has an icq and aim contact so I'll go and retrieve those to pm to you.

EDIT: An idea I had about how I may have gotten the one mission pack running is I think I installed Spear of Destiny mission 1 on my pc then installed the contents of the mission pack as well, then placed the files in the Spear of Destiny Wii build folder. Either put them directly in the main directory, or make a sub-directory in the main directory called sod2, and place the files. Cant guarantee it'll work,but it's the only thing I can think of at the moment. Remember you cant do both in the main Spear directory, and you may need the default Spear files for the wii build since the mission packs used the original game to run off of.



Edited 7 time(s). Last edit at 10/18/2010 07:56AM by nightwishfan1.

Thanks alot! Ill look into it! :)

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nightwishfan1
EDIT: An idea I had about how I may have gotten the one mission pack running is I think I installed Spear of Destiny mission 1 on my pc then installed the contents of the mission pack as well, then placed the files in the Spear of Destiny Wii build folder. Either put them directly in the main directory, or make a sub-directory in the main directory called sod2, and place the files. Cant guarantee it'll work,but it's the only thing I can think of at the moment. Remember you cant do both in the main Spear directory, and you may need the default Spear files for the wii build since the mission packs used the original game to run off of.

Okay, Im a little confused. You say you put the Spear of Destiny files in the "root" of the "spearofdestinym1_3_full_nofiles" folder, then installed the mission pack 2 ones OVER them? Then you made a folder called SOD2 and placed what there? The Spear files (SOD) the mission files (SD2) or something else?

I went and installed mission pack 2 over the Spear files, as I said, and got a crash. Then I tried also adding the SD2 files to the same directory, and got the same crash.


EDIT:
The crash in question is always "Unable to allocate wave buffer for sound 33"
I have no idea what the hell that means.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/19/2010 12:13AM by LaughingMan008.

OKAY! Ive finally made some progress.
Thinking that one of the new enemies may be responsible for the above error, the sound thing, I copied and pasted all the .VOC files in my Wolf/Spear PC directory into my new Spear Mission 2 folder. I then rejiggered it so each was actually a copy of DOG.VOC with their original names. That got me past the sound check, but it crashed when I tried to load the game. Thats when I replaced Mission 2's "VSWAP.SOD" file with the same file for regular Spear. BAM, it loaded up. Its the new textures and enemies causing all the grief. So now both packs should be playable, but they are uuuuugly without the new textures and enhancments. Any ideas how to get it working right, new baddies and sounds and all?

For Heretic, Hexen, and Doom new high-res textures means a major engine rewrite. The same is probably the case in Wolfenstein 3D :-(

Well they arnt hi rez. Just different. Youde have to play the packs to understand. Its all the same stuff, it just looks a little different. But pretty much the same quality. Its no graphical improvment, just texture replacement, ya know?

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LaughingMan008

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nightwishfan1
EDIT: An idea I had about how I may have gotten the one mission pack running is I think I installed Spear of Destiny mission 1 on my pc then installed the contents of the mission pack as well, then placed the files in the Spear of Destiny Wii build folder. Either put them directly in the main directory, or make a sub-directory in the main directory called sod2, and place the files. Cant guarantee it'll work,but it's the only thing I can think of at the moment. Remember you cant do both in the main Spear directory, and you may need the default Spear files for the wii build since the mission packs used the original game to run off of.

Okay, Im a little confused. You say you put the Spear of Destiny files in the "root" of the "spearofdestinym1_3_full_nofiles" folder, then installed the mission pack 2 ones OVER them? Then you made a folder called SOD2 and placed what there? The Spear files (SOD) the mission files (SD2) or something else?

I went and installed mission pack 2 over the Spear files, as I said, and got a crash. Then I tried also adding the SD2 files to the same directory, and got the same crash.


EDIT:
The crash in question is always "Unable to allocate wave buffer for sound 33"
I have no idea what the hell that means.

What I think I did in the past was have the necessary files already needed for the Spear of Destiny Wii build (the ones you're instructed to place into the directory). On my PC I had the mission pack installed, and moved the files it installed into the spearofdestinym1_3_full_nofiles directory. What I dont remember is if I needed a sub-directory to place them in or not. They either go in the root, or a sub directory titled sod2..Which one I'm not sure.

The thing about this was that I tried duplicating what was on my pc. Right down to the exact folder naming, and Spear of Destiny Wii doesnt complain about that. You can rename the app folder if you wish. Anyways sorry it's confusing. It's not easy explaining everything since I tried a few approaches to what you're doing.

EDIT: While we're on the subject of mission packs....Do you think you could fiddle around with the Wolfenstein 3D super upgrades pack? That has several hundred new maps for Wolfenstein 3D as well as replacing and swapping textures in certain things, among other stuff. Problem is I think it'll be trickier than the Spear mission packs. It's also freeware, and can be downloaded from the apogee or 3drealms websites.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 10/19/2010 05:15AM by nightwishfan1.

Hi Guys,
LaughingMan has contacted me regarding this. I have not played the expansion packs but I am willing to bet on what is happening:

When you load Wolfenstein 3D (there are multiple versions btw, and from different publishers, that's why some people have a problem getting their game files to work with my port. I used Apogee's version, as it seems to be the most popular.

Basically what I'm getting at is that there's a hardcoded list within the engine of where to look for each resource, sound or graphic. When you change the *.WL6 files without updating the engine (thats why I have a SOD engine port and a Wolf port). The engine will look up on its list where a particular file is located. A wl6 is basically a non compressed archive file.

The WL6 files also contain the sizes of each file included within them. AFAIK, it's not a nicely arranged table in the beginning of the file. It may be, but I don't recall it being that easy. What I mean by this:

Let's say the engine is looking for a file called sound.voc:

The engine looks up the position of that file inside of the WL6 and reads the size of the file. Since your data isn't aligning with your internal table that function will return an incorrect value and try to allocate data for the file based on the size it reads (from the Wl6) That's why you're getting those errors, it's reading in some massive value and trying to allocate it.

I'll look at my code on sourceforge and I'll try to find any more info pertaining to these mission packs. I'm afraid it will be buried in the original 16 bit code O_o.

I'll get back to you guys with more info,
`Nick

Oh and by WL6 file I mean *.sod in this case.

Here is one of the files that is in question:

[wolfenstein3dwi.svn.sourceforge.net]

This file is compiled with the engine, you guys see all the preprocessor #ifdef's? The file was written to be tailored to any certain version, wolfenstein 3d -- or sod. The idea is you #define SPEARDEMO you're compiling a custom version of the engine for the spear of destiny demo -- for example.

So it could be one of three things:

1) The spear of destiny mission pack files and the regular files are in the same order and size (unlikely but best case).
2) When you install the mission pack does it install a new version of sod.exe? If thats the case we might be screwed since that engine would be specifically written for the mission packs. We'd have to find the source to it -- if it even still exists.
3) The mission pack file list is buried within the original 16 bit spear of destiny DOS code and not the Wolf4SDL port that I used in my port.

(Edit) I just checked out the original source from id software and it contains no code pertaining to the mission packs...
(Edit # 2) For #1, the mission pack files and regular sod files don't have to be the same size, just in the same order. This makes option #1 more likely. I won't be able to figure out why it is failing without running the port using the mission pack files thru a debugger...



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/21/2010 07:22AM by MrPeanut.

OK, give this a try:

1) Create a folder somewhere on your desktop or something, called sod_original_files. These will contain the originals obviously. I ran the mission pack installer under dosbox and it doesn't seem to remember what version of the files you have installed. Even worse, it doesn't let you switch back to the original version (option 1 under the menu). You'll keep this folder to hold your old files.

2) Create a folder somewhere called sod_missionpack_files. These contain your processed missionpack.

3) Find your original Spear of Destiny files and view them in Windows Explorer. Sort the files by type. The files we are interested in are only the *.sod files. So the only files you should be selecting are AUDIOHED.SOD, AUDIOT.SOD, GAMEMAPS.SOD, MAPHEAD.SOD, VGADICT.SOD, VGAGRAPH.SOD, VGAHEAD.SOD, VSWAP.SOD.

4. Copy those files to your newly created folders, sod_original_files and sod_missionpack_files. (both folders).

5. Copy all the files from your mission pack cd to your sod_missionpack_files directory. Overwrite all files. If it doesn't ask you to overwrite files you're copying them to the wrong directory.

6) I'm assuming you're using dosbox and have it installed (otherwise you wouldn't be able to run sod.exe). Run dosbox and sod.exe from your sod_missionpack_files directory. Select an option. This will patch your *.sod files in your sod_missionpack_files directory.

7) Back in Windows Explorer -- Copy all *.sod files ONLY. Copy those to Spear of Destiny (Wii)'s folder. Make sure boot.dol/AUDIOHED.SOD/AUDIOT.SOD/GAMEMAPS.SOD/MAPHEAD.SOD/VGADICT.SOD/VGAGRAPH.SOD/VGAHEAD.SOD/VSWAP.SOD are all in the same folder.

8) Try running it! Get back to me.

Thanks, Nick

So....A simplified process....If I'm understanding you right would be:

1. Get the original Spear of Destiny files from my cd/diskette, and create a directory under dosbox for them and install them.

2. Keep only the specified .sod files and keep them where they are, and create the sub directory you specified for the mission pack, and copy those there as well.

2. Get the mission pack files from my disks, and place them into the sub-directory you specified under the dosbox Spear of Destiny directory and install to overwrite the previous files I placed there. (btw you mention a CD and I have original disks.....does it matter, cause the cd-rom images are updated a lil).

And that will produce patched files right? And it would only be a matter of repeating the process for the next mission pack, assuming of course there is no real difference between disk copy and CD copies of the games that is. And can doing this through the wii port of dosbox produce them as well? It seems to be no different except my installation path would go to my SD card where the specified directories will be.

Hey Mr P, I wrote a kind of snotty reply to your last post, without realizing you were obviously just trying to help our friend run the packs on PC. Sorry about that. I look forward to seeing what you come up with, with the Wii coding.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/21/2010 08:25PM by LaughingMan008.