News
Server migration complete + announcements 2015-05-29 03:49:21
So some of you have expressed some concern with this site going down temporarily and with the ECWolf Wiki being offline for a little while longer than that. I'm certainly happy to see that people are actually reading the wiki. This website is hosted by MancuNET and their primary server was compromised. Manc forgot that I was using PostgreSQL and didn't migrate the wiki's database. Fortunately the host was willing to put the old server back online for a moment and everything is recovered and up and running. So yes, everything is OK with me, but thanks for asking.
With that out of the way I do have an update to post. Super 3D Noah's Ark got greenlit a few weeks ago and is now approved for release. It will launch on Steam June 23rd. You don't need to wait until then to pick up a copy as Steam keys will be provided with itch.io purchases past and future. (It actually is a better deal for me if you purchase through itch.io.) It's launching with some basic Steam integration, so June 18th (original launch date before delay) will also mark the release of ECWolf 1.3.2 which is primarily a bug fix release. However, the 64-bit Windows build will switch to SDL 2.0, with 32-bit still using 1.2 for compatibility with Windows 98.
On the Mac Wolfenstein front, I still haven't figured out where I'm going to be in the near future (I just graduated from college by the way) so I haven't been heavily looking into replacing my classic Mac. I'm happy to see that people are getting very excited about the feature though, but it will be a little while before it's truly playable still.
Update June 4th: Someone listed some PowerMacs on Craigslist for a good price right as I posted this. Picked them up yesterday, so I now have a PowerMac G4 1.25GHz DP with a GeForce 4 Ti4600 and 2GB of RAM (for people that don't follow Mac hardware, I'm pretty sure this is the fastest OS9 Mac out there without third party upgrades). The other two in the picture are 1.42GHz DPs which are not able to run OS9.
I'll finally be able to test that programs actually run on OS X 10.4 as well!
Update June 11th: Valve advised us to release on the 23rd instead, so the Steam launch has been delayed.
HWE with basic ECWolf support 2015-03-27 21:47:30
Just a quick update here since Havoc informed me that HWE now includes WAD support. Making it the first Wolf3D editor with some native ECWolf support.
Macintosh Wolfenstein Work 2015-03-09 05:36:31
Some of you have already noticed that development versions of ECWolf contain support for Macintosh Wolfenstein missions. At least to a certain extent. I did seem to just hit one set back: My PowerPC Macintosh died. The "good" news is that it is a Performa 6220CD which is pretty much the worst Macintosh ever made according to some of the sources I've seen. The symptoms are the machine doesn't even attempt to power up, which given that I've been using with with a dead 4.5v PRAM battery for awhile now suggests that it could be the issue. However, replacing it with 3 AAA batteries didn't seem to work. I still need to get a volt meter and double check that the solder job is correct, but it doesn't look like there's much hope for the system right now. I'm not exactly in the position to be buying a replacement right now, so further work here may be on hold.
With all that said, for those interested to know exactly where the support is, the levels are basically playable. There remain some big issues including the game running at the wrong speed (70Hz vs 60Hz) and the lack of a menu interface. The released source code for the Mac version was for the second encounter, which is missing a tiny bit of information. Specifically I need to figure out how to translate the pac man ghost behavior, which it sounds like Rebecca Heineman may be able to help with, we'll see. Otherwise I need to get a working Mac so that I can do a visual comparison or something like that. Third party missions basically work as well, but they often seem to include some unknown data. I suspect it's just editor markers, but I need a working Mac to look at the missions in an editor.
On a more general note there is one issue I'm not entirely sure how to solve, and that is the recommended legal way for people to obtain the game. Specifically how does one extract the game from whatever disc they may own. Fortunately Intel based Macs still include support for the old discs and include a macbinary program out of the box. However, there are a lot of people that probably have an interest in playing the game and do not own a Mac. If anyone has a solution to how one would legally obtain a macbinary of their game data with only Windows or Linux, do send me an E-Mail or post on the forums. If you would like to know how to run the game with the latest development binaries so you can test your solution, it looks for the third encounter binary as wolf3d.bin and the second encounter level set as wolflvls.bin. (Throw those files in with your wl6 files and the "IWAD" picker should detect them. You will need to provide your own font set as a shim to get the engine to start though.)
Edit: Solder job seems to be correct, so it looks like the next suspect part is the power supply. Replacing said part appears to cost more than if I were to just pick up a OS 9 capable G4.
ECWolf 1.3.1 + Doomseeker 0.12.2b 2015-01-10 00:36:59
Well I've been promising this release "next week" for a long time now, but ECWolf 1.3.1 is finally here. This should fix a few issues that some users were experience with ECWolf having trouble with creating or saving settings, among other bug fixes and improvements. More importantly it includes a custom SDL_mixer (statically linked so you can delete all the DLLs in your ECWolf install except for SDL.dll), which allows ECWolf to finally have sampled music playback including loop points. It even has support for the Opus codec, which in turn means the resampler works!
The wiki has an itemized changelog.
Also, Doomseeker 0.12.2b has begun rolling out. The direct download packages are not up yet, but it's available through the auto updater. It includes fixes for Chocolate Doom support, which apparently regressed to the point where it was impossible to join a server.