News
Wolfenmaus 2026-05-25 20:42:17
Recently I added support for passing through the parallel port to ReflectionHLE so that it can interface with a real Disney Sound Source. There's no known compelling reason why you would want to do that, but it was a bit of a wart that despite ReflectionHLE trying to keep as much of the original code compiling as possible the DSS code was sitting there disabled. Given emulating the DSS would result in the same sound that is produced when selecting a monaural sound blaster model in the ReflectionHLE settings, I figured since modern computers can have parallel ports why not go full academic and just allow a real DSS to be driven. After getting that work merged, I wondered if that tied up the remaining loose ends or if there was any other code that has yet to be enabled. NY00123 pointed out that Wolfenstein 3D had support for a virtual reality head mounted display. We started brainstorming possible things to do with that code.
Of course VR headsets are a thing, but Wolf3D didn't do stereo rendering or anything fancy like that. All that happens is when the "virtual" parameter is passed it makes an interrupt call at init and shutdown, and when in game it adds the headset angle, sitting at a predetermine location in memory, to the player's angle. Really more like how many modern games support gyro aiming. That's when it clicked, we were looking at a third analog control axis that has been in the game this whole time.
Previously it was assumed that modern WASD controls was not possible in vanilla Wolf3D because the game's control structures only included two analog axes. These being the sum of keyboard, mouse, and joystick inputs, and how the horizontal axis is interpreted was determined by if the strafe button was pressed or not. You could get strafe left and right buttons with macros, but pressing them would disable the ability to turn. Only way around that is to modify the way input is handled, and there have been mods that do this.
Utilizing the VR support, no such modification is needed. Just a mouse driver that implements the headset API, and today I am releasing Wolfenmaus which does just that. Works with Wolfenstein 3D v1.4 and Spear of Destiny. Sadly the other games that licensed the engine either did not retain this code, or were given an earlier version of the source code which did not have it. However, since the VR code was in the public source release, it is included in many of the 16-bit DOS mods. (As the VR support was previously seen as vestigial support for hardware no one has, some of the more advanced mods removed it to reclaim a tiny amount of memory.) This does have some fairly minor quirks, so be sure to checkout the README.
The VR headset this was designed for was likely the one from Alternate Worlds Technology. They appear to have had a version of Blake Stone based on the materials shown by the folks who worked on it, but this would be a different build from any of the released version of Blake Stone. They also had their own game called Cybertag. If copies of either of these were found this would presumably just work with them.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that sometimes it's worth writing the most useless code as you never know where it will lead.
Migrating away from Bitbucket 2025-12-26 07:29:47
Recently Atlassian announced that were deprecating forked repositories outside of the parent workspace. I can't really say I find this move surprising as it has long felt that Atlassian was focused on businesses with largely private repositories. For example Bitbucket has been encouraging the adoption of JIRA for issue tracking, including replacing the basic issue tracker with a JIRA board. I looked into switching ECWolf over, but found out that in order to even have a public JIRA board I had to request an open source project license, and even if the board is public anonymous users will have the wonder user experience of getting permission denied when viewing the board from Bitbucket.
Needless to say though this announcement is antithetical to the social role that hosting services like GitHub as well as Bitbucket before it was acquired by Atlassian championed. Although Git was built for emailing patches, I do believe the way these platforms eased collaboration is much of the reason that projects like ZDoom and its descendants have been able to grow as much as they have. Given that, it's clearly time for me to migrate my projects away from Bitbucket.
The new repositories for ECWolf and Doomseker can be found at https://github.com/ECWolfEngine and https://github.com/DoomseekerTeam respectively. Some of my minor project repositories are planned to be moved over as well.
ECWolf 1.4.2 2025-09-14 20:28:22
The bug fix release ECWolf 1.4.2 is available for download. Notable fixes include a fix for the screen fades breaking when using the load/save shortcuts without waiting for them to clear, and the long standing issue where save files on Windows were not portable between systems is addressed. See the full list of changes for other minor issues addressed.
Inspired by discussions around a relatively recent move by GZDoom's Windows version to move to writing log messages to the terminal/command prompt, and the troubles users have faced due to unfamiliarity with the command line on Windows, ECWolf 1.4.2 also includes a new ecwolf-console.exe which is a simple launcher program to run ECWolf with a log window. More or less a glorified batch file, but should more reliably work as a drop in replacement for running the game directly. For those who were already successfully running ECWolf from the terminal, this program may still prove useful as previously, while ECWolf would attach to the terminal window, it would not wait for ECWolf to exit leading to a confusing situation where it would appear that the prompt didn't return after the game exited (and stuff like terminating with ctrl+c didn't work). This program scans the directory it resides in for a known game engine executable so it can be used with GZDoom as well.
Jose Valecillos has contributed some changes necessary for submission to FlatHub. It is thus expected that a Flatpak should be available soon for Linux users where that's the most convenient packaging format. Particularly those running atomic distros.
ECWolf 1.4.1 2023-02-03 04:44:28
ECWolf 1.4.1 is available for download which fixes a critical bug in 1.4.0 where by under certain conditions picking up the Chaingun can crash the game.
It also addresses some transcription errors with the Fake Hitler actors, most notably they no longer can open doors like in vanilla. Loading of gray scale PNGs is fixed, and 32:9 video modes are now supported as well.