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Awilda

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Aug 5, 2024, 9:28:38 AM8/5/24

to swebalevic

Ifound on an ISO file with old games and software. One entry is

an alpha version of Quake (called "QUAKE 0.8A ALPHA"). It seems that this version is from October 1995.

I previously thought that "qtest" is the first version of Quake.

I have downloaded this version and used Winrar to "unarj" this archive. In Dosbox I can't start this version

because every time after game initialization Dosbox freeze (I tried also a virtual pc, but same problem). I

have two questions:

1. Does anybody else know if this is an official version or a fake ?

2. Is it possible to run it ?

Maybe it's useless and it will just hang again upon giving it sensible parameters. If it is a hoax, it looks pretty elaborate. Loader looks similar to Doom. QUAKE.LVM doesn't have any recognizable markings at the beginning (wads have "IWAD" or "PWAD", paks have "PACK").

If it needs DOS to run, and the version is "0.8 alpha", and keeping in mind that the other version numbered 0.8 comes explicitly from June 1996 and can be actually run in Quakespasm, then assuming it's not a hoax (it would be a far too elaborate one, and those messages are absolutely something Romero would write), it could very probably be a version of Quake from before it became an FPS??

Both Doom, and a real Quake .exe have various strings in common like "Z_CheckHeap: block size does not touch the next block", "Z_Free: freed a pointer without ZONEID", this has neither. IMO someone was reading the doom startup messages and writing similar sounding log messages.

I loaded a packet driver on the machine, hence the vector 0x60... not sure why it needs the physical IRQ. Anyways looks like everything is encrypted, has anyone found a way to decrypt/uncompress it? I guess I should use some debugger to see all the flags.

INT may be different for you.

It pass TCP check and then runs color dots and crash on both FreeDOS/DosBox

tbh you should block outgoing connections in case there is some weird traffic going out. I know it's run in a sandbox, but you never know :)

I took look at this today. quake.lvm is garbage and contains no meaningful data or hidden images/messages from whoever made this. quake.exe is mostly padded with garbage, and the code that's there does nothing meaningful (e.g. decompression, decryption, etc.) with anything in quake.lvm. On the whole, pretty boring hoax.

Only thing of note was the message "Ain't Quake grand? We here at id just looove it. Have fun getting it to work, schmuck!" This might point to someone at id (Romero?) distributing this thing to mess with pirates or whatever, but I don't see any evidence for that beyond the linguistic hints.

Just had a look. Only took a couple minutes to confirm - quake.lvm is garbage, exe is also garbage and does nothing meaningful with any of the data in quake.lvm. No fun Easter eggs or hidden messages from whoever did this. Very unimaginative hoax. D-, would not disassemble again.

Guys, this is a real version, don't listen to Dickblackshack. This is documented prior, in fact I found this independantly of you on a real bbs tape archive. This is from back then. I got it as far as displaying the loading graphic myself and it expects network and other drivers to be run at the same time as was this back then, like beame&whiteside. Don't forget initial quake release also required that for tcp/ip. This relies only on that.

So given that there is at least a loading graphic present proves that this is not all garbage, and lack of strings simply means that carmack didn't keep all that doom stuff in that it was more of a fresh start, which makes complete sense especially in the old days.

I have a testimony from acidglow (soft of) from around 2013 when he told me about this version and I believe it might be the same one. He compared it to the Unreal leak, besides guys read the NFO file. Also, don't refer to Defacto for old warez beta releases! They and many others started having policy of erasing beta releases from their lists. If you'd take this into account then the old Unreal leaks also would never surface but they were real and they are comparable to this quake stuff. It also says that this prototype had no AI, hence the small size and all, it really is very barebones but unfrotunately I don't have the resources to get it running into conditions it expects, but at least I went further than you guys did and I used a version of dosboxmg.

My friend Jeff and I were interviewed by PlanetQuake once upon a time, as part of a series (I think?) of interviews/articles about folks who ran Quake servers. When I was reminded of this many years later, I went and had a look at what archive.org had saved from that interview... it kind of surprised me with the good "war stories" and little concrete details it has, stuff that I had begun to forget. Obviously this is still purely nostalgia-bait, but if you're in the same boat as me this may tickle some fun memories.

I've copied those three pages from archive.org and cleaned them up to re-archive them here. I haven't tried to reconstruct the whole PlanetQuake layout, which would be a) almost impossible (given what's missing/unarchived) and b) just a collection of broken links anyway. So these pages just have the main interview text in the theming and colors of PlanetQuake circa 1999. Dead links have been removed or updated.

GENEVA, 27 February 2012 - The repercussions from the deadly earthquake and tsunami which hit Chile two years ago continue to play out in the country's courts and in expressions of frustration at the pace of reconstruction.

At the same time some 100 residents of the former town of Cordillera de Rancagua occupied the Serviu offices of Housing and Urban Services to protest what they claimed was the late delivery of their new homes but were told the houses would be ready by Friday once the deeds had been signed.

Over 100 temporary villages sprang up after the earthquake to house over 4,000 families who were among the worst-affected and their living conditions remain difficult. 50,000 homes are now being built.

The Attorney General's Office announced earlier this month that eight people including National Emergency Office staff are to be prosecuted for "criminal negligence...for their participation in decision-making by technical agencies charged with issuing and disseminating tsunami warnings to the population."

According to the Attorney General's office, no warning was issued to the general population in time to prevent the disaster. An alert was issued but then deactivated only to be re-activated when it was too late for many communities along the affected coastline.

Jaime Soto, representative of Swiss ATS (Asociacin Territorios Solidarios de Suiza) says: "The lessons are many and must be assimilated into Chilean society as a whole. Public policies should focus on reducing disaster risk particularly at the level of local government. Our legislation should be updated and we also need to take the new context of climate change into account.

"In the two years since the earthquake the country has witnessed a succession of major disaster events. These have included the volcanic eruptions in the Puyehue-Cordn del Caulle range, the burning of Torres del Paine in southern Chile, two years of drought in central Chile which is affecting food production and flash floods in mountainous areas of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile."

He recalled that a good start on reform was made last year when on the 1st anniversary of the earthquake UN Habitat and UNISDR participated in a meeting in the town of Talcahuano which brought together local government representatives from the Bo-Bo region, Ministry of Housing representatives and civil society organizations to discuss reconstruction issues and to launch the UNISDR "Making Cities Resilient" Campaign.

But you can run converted maps in any Quake 3 version (retail version)

a test versions like this s3quake3.exe is pre-release, and their map formats different, different bsp structures, its not trivial to convert them i think.

I can't figure out how to try my original unreal with S3TC Textures on my Savage4. Regardless what I do I get corrupted textures.

My machine is a Win95b P2-333 32MB S540 AGP Card. I am using the Win95 DX6 drivers.

Since I finally got my hands on a Savage4, I've decided to play around with it for a bit. I'm using Unreal Tournament '99 GOTY with S3 Metal rendering and compressed textures installed from the second CD.

In the screenshot below, I'm directly comparing the S3 Metal rendering of the Savage4 to the Direct3D rendering of a GeForce4 Ti4200. Note that the screenshot doesn't correctly capture the gamma values used by the game in S3 Metal mode. This is why the Savage4 screenshot looks so dark. In the actual game, it's much brighter.

Still, the level of detail on that floor texture is pretty awesome. The framerate using the S3 Metal renderer is pretty good too. However, I am a bit disappointed that so few hi-res textures are used on the stock maps. From what I've seen, it's only a few floors and walls here and there

Of course, nowadays you can get fan made patches which improve OpenGL and Direct3D renderers significantly and offer the same compressed texture functionality. But back in the day, I think it was S3 or nothing. Also, note that there's a difference between "Compressed Textures" and "Detailed Textures". The latter can be enabled on any card, but it's not the same thing.

Note that the compressed textures also lack detail texture rendering on top so there's less stuff to eat fillrate with (and UT's D3D renderers give *more* detail layers than even Glide so it's not parity either)

How prudent of me would it be to make terrain out of brushes and patch meshes? If I want to use the EasyGen editor, what resources left on the internet are there that I can use to teach myself? Would anyone who still comes to this website know how to use EasyGen or advise me on what the best thing to do next is? My map currently contains 3646 brushes and 156 entities.Tig Rep. 1752

#2 20 May 2021@KommissarReb (SW12) I could write out how to use bitmaps and EasyGen or other terrain building tools. This would be a long, complex chunk of text that would be hard to follow.These are an older way of making terrains.A newer, better option would be to check out the map source for Pyramid of the Magician by Sock.Basically, a combination of small detail brushes placed over the top of structure brushes. This is the key: many hand tweaked detail brushes on a base of structure brushes.leilei Rep. 413

#3 20 May 2021When I dabbled in terrain, it was in Trenchbroom and I clipped a big brush into grids and moved those verts up. I feel that was enough for me, though there's the issue of the texture coordinates flipping when the brushes reach certain angles (which is kind of alleviated with the q3+valve220 map format support). Making a shader that has forcemeta and shadeangle was also vital to keeping the terrain looking less jagged in the shading.Patch-based terrain introduce clipping issues, and there's also the sometimes-blindly-suggested model-based terrain which will lead to extremely bloated clipping hulls that will force you to make some hacked up simplified variation of the map for compiling .aas files at all. Marks will also have trouble being added (especially if it's complex terrain where there may be too many polygon splits).Many of the techniques in Pyramid of the Magician were at a time when q3map2/bspc wasn't well suited for terrain and large maps. There's been some improvements on that since.

Edited 2.02 minutes after the original posting.

Edited 21.96 hours after the original posting.themuffinator Rep. 1054

#4 28 May 2021Simon O'Callaghan had excellent tutorials until he decided to vanish off the internet, again :(