This will be used to archive news.

I live again.
April 27, 2000
A very slow couple of weeks. I managed to fix that bug in the sound code - only to find another one! Yes that article - hmmm. It will have to wait I'm afraid - I just didn't get time. As compensation of sorts, there's some more code on the downloads page. There's a lot more in there than previous examples. The code includes a little graphics library, pmode stuff and shows you how to figure out Heretic sprites confusing (but efficient) format. Hope it helps! I'm trying to figure out how Heretic does its game synchronisation/timing. If anyone can explain it to me, please contact me! Thanks. p.s. Will - I'm going to put the banners up tomorrow - honest ;)
Slow progress.
April 10, 2000
Very slow progress over the last week - mainly due to a heavy bout of door painting at home :) Sound and music is now working, but there is a bug in the sound code, which I can hopefully fix this week. It turned out my wadscan program (see prog1.c in downloads) was really useful in searching through the Heretic WAD to find out what sound lumps I needed to be checking for. :)

Over the next week or two I shall be putting out a version of the DOS code for download. I'm then moving on to other things (involving the Heretic source). I won't spend a great deal of time enhancing the DOS port unless I get some feedback that there are people out there that want it.

I also plan to put up the first of a series of articles around Thursday or Friday this week.

If anyone is interested in getting into BSP trees, I have written some very simple tree code which will serve as a basic intro. Notice I've adopted the Raven programmer's comment style ;) As with any of the code I post, feel free to email me about it if you have any questions.

Working!
April 3, 2000
Got eHeretic running (well limping along really) :) Robin MacCleod pointed out to me that Heretic likes 'signed char' char data types. Fortunately DJGPP seems to support this by default - but I think it depends on the target CPU. The main problem seemed to be a 'dodgy' DPMI call I was making. Yuck. It sure trashed my machine though - so much for memory protection ;)

I'm definately going to release the source for what I've done at some point, but that is way off yet. I need to do some serious tidying of the code and some bug fixing before then. Same goes for a (hopefully reliable) DOS EXE. Once that's done it's on to the 'second phase' :)

Work continues!
April 1, 2000

I managed to get eHeretic building. On running it rebooted Windows 98 for me - oops! ;) I'm now in the debugging phase :( I managed to trace to the problem area, but haven't fixed it yet. Debugging PMODE DOS is the pits though. One thing that's worrying me is the segread function I wrote :

void segread (struct SREGS *segregs)
{
fprintf (tracedev,"segread...");
// segregs->es = ES;
segregs->ds = _my_ds();
// segregs->fs = FS;
// segregs->gs = GS;
segregs->cs = _my_cs();
segregs->ss = _my_ss();
fprintf (tracedev,"OK\n");
}

 I had to guess at what this should do really as DJGPP doesn't have this function for some reason - though Borland and Watcom have it. If anyone knows the proper way to do a segread in DJGPP I'd be interested to hear from you.

Continuing with some example code, I whipped up a little extension to prog1.c This one extracts a flat and displays its data. Check it out on the downloads page. BTW if you're thinking of doing anything with the Doom/Heretic source, get a copy of the Unofficial Doom Specs (v1.666) by Matt Fell from the Net.

That's it until early next week - tomorrow I'm painting doors - sigh!

You've probably noticed I'm sporting a wonderful new logo courtesy William Mull - thanks Will!
First Update!
Mar 31, 2000
On line - at last! :)

Well, this is the very first update to the eHeretic pages! Hopefully over the coming months this site will grow into a useful source for those contemplating working with the eHeretic source code. As far as the web pages themselves are concerned I'd like to keep them simple, fast loading and easy to read and navigate. You've probably noticed my HTML skills are somewhat basic. ;) Hopefully the content will make up for this, at least until my HTML skills improve a bit! By the way if someone wants to contribute a cool header image for the site I'd be delighted!

Last night was the first chance I got to really do some serious work on the Heretic source. I wrote a little utility to scan through and analyze the WAD file (see downloads) and also rewrote much of i_ibm.c I've got most of the code compiling now under DJGPP. The main problem to solve next is converting the 2 TASM files to something that DJGPP can digest!