31/07/2011 @22:13:47 ^23:19:05

Recently I've been on an rboom patching spree and I'd much rather be doing that than writing map reviews. So, no site updates.

On Plutonia 2 and maps numbered higher than 32

After writing Plutonia 2 I was contacted by The Green Herring, author of map33, who reminded me that PL2 was in fact the first of the modern megawads that have over 32 maps, and therefore began the trend, in a sense.

The reason is because of a quirk in the original Final Doom executable, which would allow a 33rd map, unlike regular doom2.exe which would crash if you tried. So it's a kind of very obscure easter egg.

Unfortunately in the modern era, such subtleties are lost on the majority of players who use source ports and are simply not aware of such original .exe quirks. (I certainly wasn't. I used to use Doom2's exe in the dim and distant past but never the Final Doom version - I didn't get Final Doom until late 2002, by which time I'd almost completely switched to PrBoom. Nevertheless I find this type of thing fascinating so I'm posting about it!)

All Hell Breaks Loose Revisited

Finally I got enough fixes into rboom to play this thing properly. Actually rboom didn't even exist then. I think PrBoom trunk should support it too, but I'm not sure if 2.5.0 is new enough. Of course PrBoom-Plus has supported it for ages, that's where I got the fixes from.

I notice that some of the review is wrong because of broken DeHackEd patch support: the rude demons are brown, there are no green ones that leave overlarge corpses. The green ones are meant to be flying barons, like in Scythe 2 but not quite as nasty, and there isn't two different types of them.

lame in sid

I was extremely surprised to notice the appearance of a lame package in Debian, since it was always at the top of the unable to package list. I know this because making a lame package from upstream's packaging was one of the first things I did with Debian packaging and stuff, after discovering said ban on packaging, and the upgrade replaced the same 9-year-old package I had installed...

"RjY's amazing private copy!!", rest in peace